Birdie Num Num

"I woke early one morning, The earth lay cool and still When suddenly a tiny bird Perched on my window sill, He sang a song so lovely So carefree and so gay, That slowly all my troubles Began to slip away. He sang of far off places Of laughter and of fun, It seemed his very trilling, brought up the morning sun. I stirred beneath the covers Crept slowly out of bed, And gently lowered the window And crushed its fucking head."
-- Unix fortune files? Brown Magic's roommate's wall? Authorship fiercely disputed.

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I miss some old-school games. "Chidiya Ud" is NOT one of them. Still, this site here has instructions and if you have never played this game AND happen to have a split personality, you can just play against yourself.

Just don't crush your partner's fingers if you lose, ok?

Tomorrow is Caturday

The emergence of a new joke is probably the internet's equivalent of a new series debuting on TV. Things -and I don't know what else to call them, for they are not jokes certainly - like singing hamsters and dancing babies are like "According to Jim" (or any other middle-of-the-road sitcom.)

Weird, inside-jokes like "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" remind me of some of those cartoon shows on "Adult Swim". They're not for everyone and if you get the joke, it's a pleasant 17 seconds spent in the office (and another 10 minutes forwarding links to friends.)

So now the LOLcats unleash their wide-eyed, furry fury on the 'net.

Lolcat images consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene.

(From the Wiki)

If you were a Fark.com visitor a few years ago, you would have seen the source of this joke: the "please spare the kitty" photoshopped picture. (And you also know the context of that punchline ;))

So anyway, here's a site dedicated to LOLcats. Some images are very funny ("wuz dat noisez?") and some are just "meh".

And there's your 17 pleasant seconds.

Mantra Cycle Up* And What's New Is Old Again

Damn those obsessive fans who found secret meanings and clues in everything the Beatles wrote and recorded.

Except that this time they may be right:

"Memory Almost Full" can be rearranged to spell "for my soulmate LLM"-- the initials of the late Linda Louise McCartney

Pitchfork has an interview with Macca.

Want to run anagrams for "Abbey Road" and "Rubber Soul"? Use the Anagram Server. Interesting/funny/bizarre Beatles-related anagrams are most welcome in the commentspace.

*Paul McCartney
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The Beastie Boys have a "post-punk instrumental" album out in June. Oh yeah!!

"____________ ____________ ever"

Spiderman 3 must be the worst movie ever. It has the "changing-clothes-to-peppy music" montage. What more do I have to say?

Alphonso is the greatest fruit ever. But I also miss the Langda. I wonder, if they marketed the "Langda" here, and that name being politically incorrect and all, will they sell those puppies as "mango with minor physical disability"?

"Puppies" is the worst American slang ever. I recently ordered a panini at a Whole Foods store and the guy fixing my sandwich says "let me grill this puppy up". Images of a sweet, sad-eyed puppy being shoved into a hot grill flashed in my mind. "Fixing a sandwich" is also a strange phrase. Try translating it into Hindi. "Tumhara sandwich theek kar doon?"? (Or, "tumhare sandwich ki marammat kar doon?")

Rockabilly is the best music ever.

Free Music Thursday

You're going to love this: some terrific African music on this blog. (link to "Awesome Tapes From Africa", via Metafilter)

There's funky guitar rock in there (African guitar rock sounds SO much fresher than anything happening in the West at the moment) as well as hip-hop, so that should make everyone happy.

There really is just too much 'pod goodness on that blog, so if you guys dig up something really cool, share it with everyone in the commentspace. (And if you can afford to buy any of these albums or MP3s, please do.)
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I just recently noticed the new Free Napster - no registration and no sign-ins! Simply search for a band or a song and press play. (Looks like they have even eliminated the commercials?!)

As a demo, how about this weepie? Those of you without a girlfriend (or a boyfriend - or both?) are allowed to cry into your pillow.

Careful With That Wax, Jackie

I see that I have a "missed call" on my cellphone and I don't recognize the number. There's a voice-mail too.

The voice - part-Valley Girl, part-Garden State, all delightful- informs me, almost breathlessly, that I have an appointment with Jackie this morning. "Jackie will be happy to take care of the waxing during this appointment."

Sad, that Valley Girl called the wrong number and now both she and Jackie will get an earful from the client, whose body must be covered in a thick, clumpy overgrowth of hair by now.

Slowing Down A Chipmunk

What would the Chipmunks sound like at a slower speed?

Passion For Cribbing

I'm kind of late to this party and this has been DesiPundited an' all, but if you haven't read it yet, now is your chance to bemoan the lack of standards and integrity in the Modern World.

The back-story:

Film-crazy blogger-filmmaker goes to a film festival and runs into Quentin Tarantino. Lucky bastard (the blogger, not QT). Then he (again, the blogger, not QT) blogs the encounter/conversation on a blog called "Passion For Cinema". Meanwhile, somewhere in the hot, humid bowels of Mumbai Mirror, sits a "film critic" called Subhash K. Jha...you know the rest of the story, don't you.

And now the links: DesiPundit, Passion For Cinema and no, I'm not going to link to that piece of crap newspaper here.

"Paeans And Aches"

"pray don’t jostle, please don’t push
for I am aging fast."

A blogger known to us has put his poetry up on a blog.

Brave man, because he has also included poems written by him when he was just a wee lad. And everyone knows what wee lads write about. ("To love and lose is noble/All the world loves a lover/Even more so a jilted lover/but what about us poor saps?")

Fear not. He also writes lines like: "....I’m dying to pee here/It would be nice/If you left the loo key here.")

Cow Inns A Dense*

You wore the same shirt!

My life is filled with coincidences. Like this little game I play with the radio. I ask the Wife to randomly pick an FM station and I predict the song it will be playing (if the station's on a commercial break, the next song counts.)

I always predict "Desperado" and the Wife always finds a Mexican music station.

*My first ever Dylan mondegreen: "take what you have gathered from coincidence" (It's All Over Now, Baby Blue)

I can bet at least two of you are either listening to that song right now or thinking of Googling its lyrics. Or there's a vagabond rapping at your door.

Something.

Why My World Is Filled With Joy And Laughter. Or At Least A Snarky Chuckle.

Seen in the CD rack at a public library: "The Essential Michael Bolton".

I'm more interested in knowing what songs didn't make it to the album.

If Only More Bad Guys Wore Black Hats...

"I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people," US army spokesman Col John Nicholson told reporters in Washington by video conference from Afghanistan.

There is something very Helleresque/Kubrickesque (stopitesque!) about this apology. Especially the caption under one of the pictures: "US-led forces say they kill fewer civilians than the Taleban".

Plenty Of Moss

As if the Nineteen-sixties have not already been celebrated and analyzed to death in the media, here comes Rolling Stone's fortieth anniversary special. Well, some of the interviews are fun to read, despite leading, self-congratulatory questions like "What did Rolling Stone mean to you in 1967?" The most entertaining interviews are:

Jack Nicholson comparing Bob Dylan and Jiddu Krishnamurti - not their philosophy but their stage entrance. (He also reveals an interesting fact: that he appears in a Beatles' home video, circa 1968, totally stoned. Somehow, I can't imagine John Lennon and Jack Nicholson in the same room.)

Dylan making some funny Boblike comments about global warming and politics and showing some major love to John and Paul (calling the latter "the only person I am in awe of" and the former "one of the greatest singers ever".)

Bob Weir going all cosmic and shit (something about how he is happy just to sit and watch a bug and its bugness) and talks about something totally crazy: how he invited Ann Coulter backstage. Now there's a musician with an open mind.

Neil Young, talking about his politics and leaving Buffalo Springfield.

Ringo getting all blunt (he calls the Police reunion "boring") and anarchic in his interview (exhorting the bands of today to "oppose everything that we stood for".) He also declares "Revolver" to be his favorite album. (And why do all interviewers insist on asking the same goddamn stupid questions about "Sgt. Pepper"?)

Yes, and this issue has those scratch-and-sniff perfume ads too. This is a rock magazine.

Upgrade Or Die

Nice work, Intuit, killing Quicken 2004 with just a "as you have been notified...".

I now have piles of bills sitting on my desk and, for the first time in nearly 142 years, I have to write checks and lick those stamps.
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On the off-chance that your Sunday afternoon does not involve writing checks and licking stamps, you should be watching Ahmet Ertegun's bio on PBS. This great man (who gave the world Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin, Cream and Aretha Franklin) was the one who suggested Phil Collins add "more drums" to "In the air tonight".

Come on, he gave us Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin, Cream and Aretha Franklin! That's not good enough for you?

It's Superman! It's A Bird!! It's A WTF??!!

It's a Boeing 737 sitting in the middle of a road in Bombay.

Do not panic.

Thanks to the Cartoonist Formerly Known as Mock Turtle for this most entertaining link.

I just hope they don’t get away with serving hot towels and mini-pretzels as compensation to the affected residents.
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Look, mama, the Pakistani government put out an ad to find missing radioactive material!
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Hey, Sri Lanka and Nepal, let's see you guys get your own funny-scary news stories on the BBC next week.

Sadashivam's Blues

I am in deep despair.

The Kinks could easily have written an funny, wistful minor-key song based on this lovely poem by Neha.

Not to belittle anyone's opinion, and that's exactly what I am going to do now, but I read a very funny comment on her blog: "I don't see the crux of this poem here".

The "crux" of the poem? How about a 10-point executive summary of the Key Feelings Evoked By The Poet and a 45-slide Powerpoint presentation on Impacts of The Poem On the Enterprise?

OK, but I would still like to know the crux of Bunuel's "The Discrete Charms of the Bourgeoisie". Actually, not. The crux of that film was "always plan your meals carefully".

The Bees

Most unusual: Bees are disappearing.

Why is this important?

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, “honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops,” a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Many theories have been proposed to explain the "colony collapse disorder" phenomenon (previously known as the Fall Dwindle Disease), but the one involving cellphones obviously got the most attention.

If only bogus theories disappeared first.
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And here's the Dead, circa 1970, covering Muddy Waters' classic "I'm a King Bee" (Track 4, streaming audio, link to archive.org)