Another link in the chain

I have been (shiver me timbers) tagged. In a time when (in Don LaFontaine's voice, if you will), despite the existence of a wide spectrum of communication, Canis Minor chooses to be secluded in invisibility (albeit technically); and at some point of time, has to come out of the kennel (not closet) and put the tongue out to gather some moisture (despite ambient humidity being considerably small). Being held together and tied with the morbid leash that is more than just a leash (hint: a leash is a mere fiber in the rapidly growing __ ), the silencer of the bone is dropped from his ever-so-weak jaws, and incoherent barks follow.

The dog gets warned by Jacob the Maltese Poodle (from Charles Dachshund's A Christmas Canine), that there are going to be three T.Rex skeletons that he has to dig up, that will haunt him through the holiday that it is. Here goes.

1. The T.Rex skeleton of Canine Past

Your Oldest Memories: Being dressed up like a girl-child for my first birthday. I had long hair, perfectly reddened henna on my hands, carbon black on my eyes, and was holding a powder tin in my hand. If only I had that photo with me now...

What were you doing ten years ago?: Very competitive days at school. Lots of playing football, post World Cup. Being part of an invincible triumvirate of power in class, yet being socially inept. Never having imagined where I would be now - I had plans to become a chef :-D . Waiting for the onset of puberty - I'd have to wait another couple of years :-P

So much for slurping on those extra-large tail vertebrae...

2. The T.Rex skeleton of Canine Present

Your First Thought in the Morning: (depends on timezone) Waking up to a dream about being in a redwood forest. Continuing thoughts about the history of Spain and how every city there wants to be an independent state. Hmmm, I can't wait to get my hands on maple & brown sugar Granola, with organic non-non-fat (yes, double negation!) Californian milk, fresh Guatemalan bananas and Hershey's chocolate sauce.

If you built a Time Capsule today, what would it contain?: Too much to add - since it's supposed to a "time" capsule, how about all the time that I have lived through so far? I believe that it is important for one to learn from and cherish every moment one has lived through. Reminiscing is one of the great gifts our brains have been endowed with: memory is one thing, reminiscing a much bigger thing!

Jaws not giving away that precious "wish"bone (furcula, if anatomically precise).

3. The T.Rex skeleton of Canine Future

This Year: As much of a clear roller-coaster ride this year has already been, I am counting my blessings. I will continue to do so, to the end of the year, when this lazy dog hopes to take a run and listen to his master's voice, bark at the moon with his brethren, and leave pug marks on wet sand, that will indirectly embrace the cold yet all-consuming ocean. But as Frost said, "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep..."

What you see yourself doing 14 years from now: Oh, this was bound to happen. The question asked in an interview for which no one ever answers honestly. If it were longer than that, as the great economist Pota once said, "In the long term we are all dead". And be it coincidence, he too has posted to his blog after quite a while! In another 14 years, I see myself as a 35 year old single man, struggling to make his impact on the research world; trying to learn the native language to the obscure location he has chosen to move to; trying to teach what he is yet to learn, and continuing efforts to understand this ever-complexifying (on the outside) and ever-simplifying (to the offbeat observer) universe.

A bit of a snippet: the canine with the T.Rex skeleton of the future (no points for guessing which one is which).
Every bone that comes to the dog, gets the licking it deserves, and is then buried, to be dug out and rediscovered later. Therefore, I don't tag anyone :-P (tongue out for a reason)

Sunny Days are on, and so is Haymaking

I know this is more than cliched, but then, somehow, some of the happiness just needs an outlet :-)
Spoiler (courtesy ~Makam (and the tilde is intentional) ): and now you may proceed...

The day had finally come, albeit under a lot of tension (most of which might have been unnecessary). I had almost never thought out an event before to such maniacal level of detail and exhaustion. But since the stakes are high, I had to plant enough daisies to push. One interesting bit of the boring detail that was unnecessary, but nevertheless planned: if it were (in a finite probability) to be an unfavorable result, I was ready to finish most of the depression in a blog post to have been titled 'The Longest Day', 'A Midsummer Nightmare' and the likes (and I did have an (R-Q) fear that the post titles were ominously fitting the probable negative outcome). As you probably would have figured out, it was indeed perilously close to this.

But ah, fortunately, life doesn't always favor neurotic fears of befitting blog post titles, and hence, it has boiled down to a not-so-perfect (but cheerful indeed) Sunny Days (I certainly don't intend any reference to any book). And now is the time to let 2 months pass by doing nothing. Stay at home, doing nothing, gaining weight to the happiness of parents (and yet, much to my own chagrin). And I can't overstate this, but if I hadn't got internet, I would have been choking by now - it has indeed become one of the primary requirements in life. 'Pah!' it is, to the old Roti-Kapda-Makaan. It might as well be Leftovers-Rags-Streetside but not without high speed internet please! It is quite apt, especially when one realizes one is going to be at the bottom of the food chain for the next few years :-) Hurrah for the underdwellers that we are going to be (of course, god alone knows how the situation would change when you're half a day behind, but history seems to support the assertion).

One of the things that I have absolutely loathed after coming is the apparent hip-value being assigned to FM radio in Cochin. Why would it suddenly become the "new revolution" when the thing was invented and well in prominence decades ago!? One can be rather sure that half the (educated, as it goes for Kerala, as if that makes a difference) population does not have a clue what FM stands for (not that they need to know). Before, when one was travelling by the city buses, one needn't have to listen to anything but for competing musical horns and the constant so-fast-you-can't-make-out-a-syllable shouting of the bus destination and route by the cleaner/conductor. But now, you have to listen to some imbecile blithering nonsense (the redundancy here is intentional, it is that bad) to an even-worse caller calling into the show to gossip about god-knows-what. Oh, the horror! On this note, I can't forget to mention something that passed while watching the excessive advertising that's been given to these stations. One of them is called Radio Mango. I can't imagine who came up with the bright flourescent orange color for a mango (!) for the logo of the station. Please, the last time I saw that was on some highschool girl's (or effeminate guy's) history textbook or on sidewalk advertisements for Royal Circus and the likes. Further, where on earth do you have orange mangoes? Is this mango having an identity crisis? I'm astounded by the amazing advertising skills of the Malayali youth :-)

Some other random thoughts that I add due to impulse:
1. I'm rather sad that The Undertaker is out of the WWE (atleast for now). The man has always been a pleasure to watch (one very noteworthy occasion being 10 minutes before an end-semester exam). Despite his age, the man always manages to get to you with his feats of strength and atheleticism. And simply with his presence in the ring.
2. Hurrah for the Ferrari 1-2. It was fun watching Kimi somehow push the car all the way despite that hideous damage to the exhaust pipe section. I still miss Herr Schumacher, but then you can't deny that there is some class among the present drivers too.
3. As I might have already told some of you being bored on Google chat, college has made me averse to anything on TV but for Sports and some History Channel/Discovery Travel & Living. If I'm watching a movie or a sitcom, I have the compulsive urge to reach out for a non-existent spacebar when I feel like taking a snack, and arrow keys when commercials are on. Computers have sure spoiled us :-P
4. Vettiness prevails!

Obligatory, maybe

Moments of happiness in one of the final days of B.Tech:

- Surrendering (reluctantly) the institute ID card to get clearance from the library; and then thinking of going to the top-level of the library, to see that wonderful sight from the top, and then sliding down the smooth railings of the several flights of stairs.
- Finding that I've scored the perfect ten in my final semester of IIT, and crossed the "unwritten-respectable-mark" of 8.5 in CGPA.
- Celebrating the same with Deepu (with whom I shared the honor) at CCD, mostly by chewing the many ice blocks (they don't have cubes, they come in some other vague shape) in the green apple soda.
- Cool, windy, cloudy evening after a hot and sunny day.
- Getting my cycle repaired, and in better shape, before it changes hands in the near future.
- Writing this blog post :-)

Quoting

"Small World"

Now that's going to be my favorite phrase to quote for quite some time to come... And it only makes me proud that I am quoting someone with whom I've seen this phrase in use just too many times (so much, it makes sense that it be used more).

One might think that I have a bit of what is nicely described in this episode of House MD. But then, doesn't what we see, hear etc ('sense' may well be a generic term of use here) also become some part of us? Shhh!

PS: With reference to this, for some reason I feel the other way round. (And now, I have to remind myself to be more subtle...)
But then again, I have an almost uncontrollable urge to do this, and hence I choose not to be extremely subtle :-) (Hint: See below)

LSD Anyone?

At the outset, let me point out that the title has nothing to do with wild my digressions about LSD and Bicycle Day, which have been just a result of how impressed I was with the amount of stuff Wikipedia has about it. It is more to do with a claim that I want to make about something else.

Much like this quote from Apocalypse Now: "I like the smell of napalm in the morning... smells like victory;" and a score of similes used by the British in their comedies... I'd like to make one such statement. The music I like most, feels like it's 8 AM on a cool and sunny January day in a hill station in the Nilgiris, and you've just had a bath in cold water, and are watching and feeling the warmth of the sun and comfy wind.

This might sound completely idiotic, but it is an existent and recorded feeling for me :-) Now, I'm really sounding like I'm on LSD am I? Take it only as a reference to something called synesthesia/synaethesia. This is a phenomenon where sensation is "in the wrong sense" - something like being able to "see" music, or associating words with color etc. There are some beautiful ideas pointing to probable causes of this being neurological. They can be found here. There is something else that I'd like to pick up on, from the same source, but I'll write about it later.
Coming back to synaesthesia, I do have one brilliant example of a related idea, in this music video of the song 'Star Guitar' by the Chemical Brothers (check here for a high-res version). Watch the video (preferably in high-res) once, watch it again, and then read the Wiki article. If you're watching it the for the first ever time, and are able to get the idea of the music video, in all probability, you have a thing for the arts, or you just have good skill of observation. You ought to watch some of the other music videos by the same director, Michael Gondry.

Now for one of the other nice neuro/psychological problems/phenomena discussed in the book - about autistic savants. It is an interesting anomaly, when one may have very little skills in basic arithmetic and yet be able to find 8-digit primes with astounding ease; or have very little writing skills adnyet be able to draw in finer detail than HD. It's like an image of a serial killer made with collaged images of his victims (and damn, I don't have that link!). I wonder how many of these people write the trivia sections in Wikipedia articles - because some of the things in those sections are incredibly difficult to spot (and some being not easily verifiable, this being one of the reasons Wikipedia discourages trivia sections). So, being unbearably painful and bad at writing as I am, I'm writing the trivia section for my favorite episode of Dexter's Laboratory.

Dexter's password to the lab: Star Wars

The list of things to do correlates very nicely to what Dexter does:
1. Study for French test - which he does with the Subconscious Discographic Hypnotator
2. Break DNA Code - for which he just looks at a glowing jar.
3. Podiatric sterilization - trimming toenails :-)
4. Rodent aerobic trials - hamster!!!
5. Aquatic nutrification - feeding the fish
6. Solve energy crisis - which doesn't completely show up on the display initially, and then never...

In the game of Tic-Tac-Toe he plays after finishing items 2-5, crosses began the game, and won with the diagonal (0,2)-(2,0) (if your indexing starts from 0)

When the list is shown again, the items are different:
3. Fix Hubble, 4. Split quark, 5. Name the galaxy

The discs he finds: Atomic Fun, Sound of Math (which uses a strange base D, for the numbers), Steven Hawks Sings (obvious reference), and finally... Learn French (Francais disc).
The French disc starts with the speakers Jean-Pierre and Sophie/Sofie, talking about breakfast items, the first being cheese omelet - the immortal omelette du fromage. The record gets stuck on the word, and there is a good job done on the sound too. If you listen carefully, you can hear the head going back to the original position at the end of each omelette du fromage.

The next morning, Dee Dee calls him "Poophead" prompting him to shout at her, only to realize that he can only say "Omelette du fromage"! And then she goes into mocking him with "That's all you can say!" Interestingly enough, you only see cereal on the table, but then she kicks out pancakes from there.
Despite this misfortune in the morning, our man does get the question he cannot get wrong :-)

Advanced math class - tempts me to link to this post. "A train traveling at 460 W from England, by the circumference of the city of Wisconsin, terminated in air-speed to ground-weight ratio. What city in France will the trains collide?" The same goes for what is scribbled on the board...
Later, as girls fall for French, the bully kids (one with a cap reading "Phat") too get intimidated by it.

In the gameshow in which Dexter becomes the 'greatest winner of all time', he wins $ 700,000. Soon he is singing the magic word, and it becomes a bestseller. Yellow T-shirts with it written on them...
Then comes the Nike spoof with 'Just Dü it" (I wonder whether that is supposed to be a heavy metal umlaut.
The Times hails omelette du fromage as Miracle Cure, and our man as a genius (which of course he is). At the United Nations, the flags visible are India/Hungary (wrongly represented in either case), Monaco/Indonesia, Sweden, Panama, South Korea, Pakistan. Shown shaking hands are (stereotypical) Russian and American, Egyptian and Ethiopian(?), Indian(?) and Scottish, Arab and Mexican.
Soon, he is the Times Man of the Year (the s obviously added so as to prevent copyright infringement).
He arrives home in a limo with French flags, dressed like a Frenchman, complete with cap, shoes, and bread! To add to the celebrity status, there is kissing the baby (only to drop it right after).

He goes to his lab, only to use omelette du fromage as his password. Access is denied, thrice. The computer advises complete computer memory core meltdown and engages it. Dexter in recognition, smacks himself in the face (and Smack! is visible). The computer tells him that all active experiments will be terminated and demolecularized, and the lab self-destructs in ten seconds, with the computer's countdown slightly slower than 10 seconds. Dee Dee drills the last nail in the coffin with "That's all you can say!" Oh what a brilliant episode...

Phase of B.Tech called Final semester lunacy, thank you so much for being!