Bill's posts with tag: fun stuff
Believe me, this works.
You don't like someone and he or she knows it. He/she doesn't like you either. What can you do to really, royally piss them off?
Simple. Agree obsequiously, effusively, immediately and completely with everything they say.
You notice that this doesn't imply doing something they suggest. Just agree, agree, agree.
What will happen is that the person in question will be fairly certain that you're taking the mickey, but can't prove it.
Also, he or she can't tell you not to agree with them, can they? They can't tell you "Don't agree with what I say!" There you go. You've defanged them!
That's infuriating, it is.
Hardly surprising, after being an heretic. And a proud one too!
Link: http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?pk=1616Poor thing obviously lacks the wherewithal to buy panties...click on the bottom row of photos to get a close up, uncensored, unpixelated look at her V-lashing. Caution: everything's on view, including her Caesarean Section scar. You may be repelled.
1)How long did the Hundred Years' War last?
Choices: (a) 100 years (b) 99 years (c) 116 years (d) 345 years
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
Choices: (a) Italy (b) Ecuador (c) Panama (d) India
3) From which animal do we get catgut?
Choices: (a) cat (b) tiger (c) pig (d) sheep and horse
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
Choices: (a) September (b) October (c) November (d) December
5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?
Choices: (a) camel hair (b) squirrel hair (c) goat hair (d) horse hair
6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
Choices: (a) canary (b) crab (c) camel (d) dog
7) What was King George VI's first name?
Choices: (a) George (b) Giorgio (c) Gregory (d) Albert
8) What colour is a purple finch?
Choices: (a) blue (b) purple (c) crimson (d) violet
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
Choices: (a) Myanmar (b) China (c) Korea (d) New Zealand
10) What is the colour of the black box in a commercial aeroplane?
Choices: (a) black (b) orange (c) grey (d) brown
11) What is a German comb?
Choices: (a) Comb made in Germany (b) comb of German Silver (c) comb of German design (d) one's fingers.
All done? Check your answers below!
************************************************************************************************************
ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ
1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?
*116 years
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
*Ecuador
3) From which animal do we get cat gut?
*Sheep and Horses
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
*November
5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?
*Squirrel fur
6) The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
*Dogs
7) What was King George VI's first name?
*Albert
8) What colour is a purple finch?
*Crimson
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
*New Zealand
10) What is the colour of the black box in a commercial aeroplane?
*Orange, of course.
11) What is a German comb?
*Combing one’s hair with one’s fingers.
Happy now?
|  | My workplace:)
I've been accused of being a workaholic. Am not. |
| | Yet another motorcycle trip. This one was out to the forests on another, much lower, side of town. |
Sorry for missing out on this genre on my previous posts on Hor-hor movies.
Zombies...you've got to love them! Stiff legged, arms extended, bits of their bodies falling off, they march through the world taking bites out of people. Wait a minute...taking bites? Aren't they supposed to be eating people? Well, they don't. They just take half a bite and move on, and the bitten person promptly goes black-toothed and white fishbelly skinned and grey eyed and joins in the fun.
Maybe it's because the poor zombies are always just picking at their food that they are so evil tempered...
And of course they are in gangs, in hundreds. They have to be; which zombie, alone, has even a smidgen of a chance? He's slow and clumsy and is prone to losing arms and legs at inappropriate moments...
And they are so easy to wipe out, electrocution and mass flaming with burning petrol being far and away the best options. Which makes one wonder how they can ever reach critical mass anyway.
But, it does make good business. People like the thrill of being in danger of being eaten...
And so the armies of the dead march on. There is always at least one survivor, you see, to pass the virus or whatever it is on...
Back when I was in that institute by the Gomti river in Lucknow, then called King George’s Medical College, afterwards Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Chikitsa Mahavidyalay (yuck,could they have been serious?) and now (thankfully) King George’s Medical University (it’s now a deemed university; more of that anon), I felt myself in perpetual durance vile. It was a living prison for me for over five years…
I suppose at this moment I would be expected to explain how things have improved about my perceptions of the place, how it was a great and happy time of my life, how I realise how happy I was, without knowing it…
No.
It was awful then, my meomories of it are as awful now, and during a trip there this January (after the passage of a decade) I found it not just as bad as I remembered it, but, if anything, worse.
Well, one thing has changed…they computerised their records. No more piles of yellowed, crumbling paper in dingy brown folders tied up with fraying off white cords. No more Mr Shukla (all the clerks were Shuklaji or Mishraji or Tripathiji, you could depend on them being one of these three) to refuse to do your work if he did not feel like it. I still had to wait hours, though. Some things never change.
I remember my first sight of the place. This was in 1989. Did it look like a medical college? I suggest you look at the photos. Fine and dandy from a distance, all but impossible to keep clean and manage from close up.
I was then just eighteen, and in a strange land among a strange people, and boy were those days tough. Not that the college made things easy for us. The hostel where we were put up was a good three kilometres from the college, and we had to walk there every morning and back again for lunch, and then back to class. And so awful was the food that we, the out-of-state students, were forced to make the journey all over again at night because that way we could at least find a relatively edible dinner at a senior hostel…
The first days were bad, not just because the teachers seemed to have no idea how to teach (and this was true of almost all the teachers, all through my academic career there), but because we underwent brutal hazing ("ragging") from the seniors. This took the shape of nightly stripping and beatings, being made to simulate sexual acts, and more mundane stuff like crawling under beds or doing squats for as many times as the senior students felt like forcing us to do (not all of them, there were a few civilised ones). Sometimes what happened to us depended on the ingenuity of the people torturing us, who could – and did – take it in shifts to have their fun while we suffered all through. We outsiders were relatively privileged, actually; we often managed to escape, being lodged in a separate wing. And once we figured out at what time these characters would turn up to torture us, we had this trick: we’d lock ourselves in our rooms, with the padlock on the outside. There were three of us in one group; and one of the other two had a lock he could lock by clicking it shut from the inside. Mine, I could unlock from inside, but not lock. And the third guy could do neither. So my friend would lock us both in, and very early in the morning I’d unlock myself and go over and unlock the third guy. This way we could sleep while hazing went on in the other wing every night, till midnight at least. One night I was in my room when someone gave the (locked) door a tremendous kick from outside. Fortunately I was not showing a light (we never showed a light after being locked in…of course). I was sure we were rumbled this time, just froze, but nothing happened. I guess it was just hazers venting spleen.
The odd thing about this was that it was never legal – yet the teachers (who were supposed to curb hazing) told the senior students right in front of us that no action would be taken. This was a green light. Also, this "illegal" and "nonexistent" (because who would ever dare complain?) activity had even a fixed terminator – the "reception party". Ours was a good six months coming.
There were so many things wrong with the college that it’s difficult to enumerate them all, but unhygienic food, awful bathrooms and toilets, incredibly dusty environs, all had a role to play in what happened to us. All of us fell sick, some seriously (I had jaundice and I know others who had typhoid); and the studies were just something that took a backseat to what was happening to us.
And then came the Mandal Commission protests, but that is something I might write about in a new post sometime. Suffice it to say that it forced the college to close (this was while I was sick with jaundice) and delayed exams for the year-ending university examinations. But when the college reopened, the bastards announced exams immediately . Repeated requests didn’t get them to reconsider it, and in the end we had to boycott the exams. But that’s another story.
This article will keep on being updated till I’m done with it, it’s just begun…
  
OK, horror movie fans, time to put your fear where your mouth is. Do you want to be scared? Then do not read further…
Seriously, people, can you take these as real?
I’d rather call most of them hor-hor movies, not horror movies, because that’s how they strike me. Or har-har movies, if you prefer.
There are two types of hor-hor movie that I’m familiar with…Hollywood and Indian. Both are entirely formulaic, so you can prepare them as if from a cookbook.
First, the Hollywood.
Recipe:
Ingredients:
- A house out in the middle of nowhere, preferably decrepit. A ski lodge or desert island can be substituted.
- About six to eight young people, equally divided between the sexes. All must be attractive and dimbrained, the flakier the better.
- A dark and stormy night if possible
- "Scary" mood music.
- Psychopath bent on killing them all for reasons best known to him/her. In more recent films, it’s usually her. And she will use bizarre tools to do the job.
- Alternatively to 5., a vengeful spirit, but that’s considered infra dig in Hollywood these days.
Preparation:
1. Make the young people, probably in old van, drive to the house and take up residence. Sometimes take up residence against all reason and common sense.
2. Let them have a bonfire and party as night falls
3. Throw in some sex. If it’s a teen oriented film, no topless scenes (more on this later). Otherwise bare breasts are compulsory, in close up, in at least one lovemaking scene.
4. Let the bloodletting begin.
Comments:
While errors will appear, as in most films, hor-hor films are always cheesy. There are some basic rules:
- Young women will run screaming from killers until they are killed, but no one will come to their aid
- No one will have the gumption to fight the psychopath in unison, and since somehow they are never together, the psycho can pick them off one by one.
- The psycho will choose the most unlikely weapon possible, a chainsaw or cutlass for example. How can one ever be killed by a chainsaw? The noise will warn anyone who’s not deaf and anyone who’s not paralysed will be able to outrun someone operating one.
- The couples who have sex will all die. In this sort of film, if you have sex, you die. Usually in the act of making love, spitting copious amounts of dark red blood on each other. And if it’s a teen flick, as the man dies, the woman will jump out of bed clutching the bedsheet over her breasts (like she hasn’t got more important things to worry about than being seen naked).
- If you bathe naked, you die. Period.
- The psycho will have to allow, very sportingly, the lead couple, or at least the lead actress, to survive, often by displaying incredible idiocy (Oh, my, I didn't know she’d think of hitting me on the head with that rock-no one ever thought of it before!). The psycho might herself survive, because this leaves the door open for a sequel. If she dies it’s always twice. A first "death" and when the lead couple are in one another’s arms, a bloody and short-lived resurrection, beginning with Mr/Ms Psycho looming up, blood all over him/her, before being gorily dispatched.
Still, these are masterpieces compared to -
The Indian Hor-hor movie:
I don’t call this Bollywood, because many of these are shot in Chennai, or elsewhere. And the Mumbai stuff is indistinguishable from the rest of it, especially the creations of the Ramsay brothers…and all of it makes the Hollywood hor-hor movie look like Oscar material.
Ingredients:
The same, except that the numbers are fewer, but it’s always a vengeful spirit, not a psychopath. The audiences these films are aimed at dig ghosts.
Sometimes it will be a harmless-looking, weedy vampire; sometimes a "reanimated corpse" with red, "rotting" mask-like face. Or else just a ghost, who will inevitably use white face powder and silver contact lenses.
The spirit will always walk as though its legs are fused to the thigh, stiff legged, hands held out like a mannequin’s.
Preparation:
Evildoers get killed. Period. The righteous all have nothing to fear, though wearing skimpy clothes or acting sexually confident being a crime, you can’t expect to survive it…
Plotline:
Someone kills someone, and the someone’s ghost takes revenge. Or skimpily clad women who are just asking for it get what they are asking for…really, there’s no plotline here.
Comments:
Graveyard at midnight, brightly lighted, deserted. Along comes your typical skimpily clad young woman, in skirt and halter top, high heeled shoes, glam hairstyle. What is she doing here? Who knows? She walks along, obviously expecting something to happen, waiting for it. And white smoke appears (never, ever, is it possible in these films for a ghost to appear without white smoke) with very tinny thunder which is heard before brief flashes of lightning (likewise), and Herr Ghost makes his appearance. Herr Ghost can't appear, poor thing, without these manifestations, nor does anyone get warned. Girl runs…and later comes back to the graveyard to let Herr Ghost have another go. Hey.
Sometimes the ghost is a rape murder victim. In these cases the rape must be shown as well, with the villain licking his lips before raping, and, yes, the licking is compulsory. And the rape is depicted with visuals of entwining legs still draped in clothes. Come to think of it, in these films lovemaking is also depicted with visuals of entwined legs draped in clothes...
And when the murdered wife or rape victim comes back from the grave for revenge, laughing like a laugh track, the villain says, "Lekin tum to mar chuki thi..." ("But you died..."). Startling heights of originality.
Do you still want to hear more?????
Do you like porn?
If you do, welcome to the human race.
But then again: what is porn?
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by pornography and its relationship to human behaviour. Of course we’re all fascinated by sex. It’s why we’re here after all. Even the odd people who say they are against sex are, one can be certain, actuated by envy rather than anything else. This holds true, I’m also convinced, for what I’d call "professional virgins" – those who hold their virginity (real or pretended) up as a symbol of "purity". It’s funny when lack of opportunity or success is passed off as "merit", don’t you think? One might as well say the grapes are sour…
In India we have these fantastic laws to safeguard our morals. Of course those of you who’ve been reading my previous posts know that sex doesn’t exist in India. All births here are parthenogenic. Fascinating, how we manage to produce so many babies, isn’t it J ?
So we have laws banning skin on TV in the name of obscenity, and even movies not rated for the general population aren’t allowed on TV – and censored in the halls (I’ll come back to that point later). Funnier, because bare breasts in movies were OK after 9pm even in the mid nineties, not to mention the occasional flash of pubic hair, and in those days Indians were more prudish than they are now, just a decade later. I guess the nanny state doesn’t want to acknowledge (in true Indian mother fashion) that we’ve grown up…
So, the movies are often unintendedly hilarious when they cut scenes that just might fall foul of the censors. Kisses were banned for a long time and we had what was called the "turkey-jerk". The lips of the hero and heroine would approach each other and, at the last moment, because nice Indian girls don’t kiss, their heads would jerk back. [And similarly, drinking being un-Indian, the hand of the villain would be shown picking up a glass of (presumed) booze from the table and put it back, depleted…] There was no ban on kissing "immoral" foreigners. Raj Kapoor was allowed to kiss Ksenia Ryabinkina (who was a ballerina, not an actress) in Mera Naam Joker. She was a Soviet, after all!
Of course these days kissing is not banned either and movies swing to the other extreme with the number of kisses being a film’s USP…"no story, no editing, no direction…BUT TWENTY THOUSAND KISSES. Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen!" You get the idea.
All the same, despite what some Indians still pretend, kisses are not porn…
So, what is?
We Indians have always had a long tradition of erotica, as seen in our literature and in temple sculpture. Those were the days when we weren’t ashamed of sex and we would definitely have been a less short-fused people…is it just me or is it actually true that the more people are sexually repressed the more they are fascinated by sex? A recent survey showed that surfing internet porn was commonest in highly repressed Arab countries. And I have seen for myself how porn CDs sell (illegally) in sexually repressed India. Another aside…a funny thing there. Some time back in my town, citizen’s vigilante groups "raided" video shops for pornographic CDs and confiscated all they could find. And those confiscated CDs promptly disappeared. Where did they go?
Three guesses…
Open question: if there is not demand for porn, why is there such a supply for it?
If we don’t have sex, why are we so interested in it?
Now, there is a little distinction to be made here between porn (written or depicted, in art or film) and erotica (likewise). Although the difference, like in "obscenity" must lie in the eye of the beholder rather than any demarcations, I’d say porn is porn when the only purpose is sexual titillation, while erotica aims at sexual titillation as part of something else. Call it art or what you will. But erotica presents sex as something other than stereotype.
I’m a fan of erotica unashamed. But as far as porn goes I find it frankly hilarious. Consider a typical passage in a pornographic book: "He took out his penis. It was fifteen centimetres thick and nearly half a metre long. (OK, I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.) With a bestial grunt he rammed it home." (And she didn’t scream bloody murder?)
As for porn in film, I guess most of us know the routine. The genre begins on an entirely contrived note, the more ridiculous the better. For example, a perennial favourite is that of aliens coming to check out sexual mores on earth, or someone discovering a charm that makes him irresistible to women. Starting from this premise, the story unfolds on exactly predictable lines. The man and woman get together and they begin to kiss and stroke each other (so far so good) after which he uncovers and kisses her boobs. And then they get naked (more on this later) and he gives her a hand job. After this she gives him a hand job. Or they give each other simultaneous hand jobs. And then he goes down on her, following which she (oh this suspense is killing me) goes down (gasp!) on him. And then at last they fuck. Even the positions are calculated for maximum visibility rather than effectiveness or pleasure. For example, the woman on top with her back to the man makes for excellent visibility of the genitals. If the man is on top the woman always holds her legs apart and raised. The genitals in question are shaved so that the camera can photograph them without hindrance, and the men (always much less important in this sort of thing) are chosen for genital size not good looks or the in any case superfluous histrionic ability. After a few minutes the man flips the woman on to her hands and knees and enters her from behind. All this ends with no female orgasm that is visible (what a letdown for the poor girl) but the man withdraws from inside her and masturbates himself till he ejaculates on her face and breasts. This is compulsory at the end of the sex act. I wonder how many people in real life would put up with it.
And as for the nudity: the men are naked all right. But as for the women…you’ll find them in ribbons around their necks, in stockings and garter belts, or even, amazingly, naked. But if a woman is naked, one assumes, she would normally be barefoot as well. Instead, in all but a very few instances, these women seem to enjoy wearing hideously uncomfortable looking "sexy" shoes while screwing. Whose fantasies are they fulfilling? If I were having sex, the last thing I’d want was a stiletto heel coming down on my instep just I was approaching orgasm…
It’s the corniness that does it, really. I guess porn is always cheesy. So what gives it its appeal?
In India, you’ll find truly corny porn clips added to films being shown in sleazy theatres where the women look agonised when being kissed and who never move. This is the modern North Indian man’s power trip, I guess. For the rest of us (and I know women who watch erotica too) it might be wish fulfilment. This is the sort of women we’d want to be screwing in our subconscious mind, who do things no normal woman in her right mind would do in circumstances no one would ever encounter.
Oh, well, I prefer erotica anyway (I write some too, but don't post it). Am I weird or what?
I’ve been keeping earthworms as a hobby for the last ten years in my own compost pit, and I think it might interest anyone who wants to know how to dispose of recyclable biodegradable rubbish in a safe hygienic way.
First : You will need a spot where your compost and earthworms can stay undisturbed. This might be a pit, or a container (with a lid). I would prefer a container because
- It is easier to maintain and monitor than a pit
- It is easier to keep the contents safe from the elements
- It is infinitely easier to keep your worms from wandering away and to keep local wildlife like moles and shrews from eating your worms.
- It takes up less space.
The best form of container for this would be an old discarded oil drum. If the bottom is not rusted away, break it or at least knock a few holes in it. Remove the top in case it’s not already gone. Dig the bottom of the drum into the soil for a short distance. What you have now is an open cylinder set into the soil.
Now, line the bottom of the drum with pebbles so you keep a draining layer between the soil and your compost. If you can find cowdung, this is a good layer to put down on top of the pebbles along with a layer of straw. Now add your compost. Compost would be anything that can decompose – vegetable and animal waste (the latter includes meat/fish scraps, pet hair, old bedding for pets), flowers, grass clippings, sacks, and cardboard soaked in water (worms love the glue). Water the whole thing thoroughly and cover with a layer of soil. You will need to leave it for at least 10 to 14 days for it to rot and cool down enough to accept worms.
Warning: Worms prefer slightly alkaline conditions, but decomposing garbage tends to become acid. So avoid putting material like onion rinds and lemon peel in the compost. You might invest in a Ph meter (available at agriculture stores) to measure Ph. If it gets very acidic add a small quantity of calcium hydroxide ("slaked lime") until you get neutrality. Too much lime and the worms will die.
After about two weeks the garbage (depending on your atmospheric temperature) should be decayed and cooled down.
Worms : The brown garden earthworms (mostly pheretimoids in this country) do not survive very well in the high organic content of a compost heap. The specialist worms are Eisenia foetida ("tiger worm" because of its red and yellow bands) and Lumbricus rubellus ("red worm").
It is possible to buy them both from dealers but I don’t know any L
Alternatively, you can find them for yourself. They inhabit sludge, old piles of leaves, under old sacks left out in gardens. Wherever you find decaying organic matter, there you find these worms. I found my starter stock in an old chicken coop!
Release the worms into your compost and wait. Unfortunately, this is a slow business. You will need to wait until the worms begin breeding, so the more worms you begin with, the better.
You will soon find other animals: small black beetles, tiny orange arachnids like pill bugs, maggots. And if it gets too acidic you’ll find a small whitish nematode looking like a small segmented earthworm (but those are pseudo-segments).
Compost: Completed compost is like slightly moist, light soil, dark brown to black in colour. The bottom layers will be converted first. You will notice that as the compost forms the quantity of material in the pit/container shrinks. This is because the worms eat and excrete the material to make compost. The worms need moisture but be careful not to overwater. Almost all necessary water will come from the decaying garbage. It just needs to stay moist enough so if a handful is squeezed some drops of water come out. Too wet and the worms will migrate. If they can’t they will drown.
Compost is to be stirred up at intervals to oxygenate it and prevent packing. Always use gloves while handling it. And when you harvest it, remove the worms and add to fresh rotten garbage. The best way of doing this is to spread the compost on a sheet of cloth or paper and remove layer after layer from the top, allowing the photophobic worms to migrate to the bottom of the heap. Ultimately you have a layer of worms.
Compost is an excellent fertiliser and also the worms are saleable, so you can turn your garbage to gold!
Additional information here.
Do you like touching worms, incidentally? If you don't, this is not an activity for you.
Mr Kevin D’Castro, sir. I am so thankful to you, and this is to be taken as a token of appreciation. I’m sorry it has taken me all this time to put it up, all of twenty years, but better late than never, as they say.
Now, sir, I’m aware that you have always had the greatest possible regard for your students, and this is why you followed us up, year by year, from class to class, all the way from Class 8 to Class 10. I am also aware that due to the unfortunate fact that I was trapped in another section in Class 8 I was deprived of your sapient guidance for the first of those three indubitably crucial years, but surely we can gloss over that since it was due to events beyond our control.
Now, sir, I am aware that your control over Mathematics and English was not of the greatest, so I appreciate all the more your volunteering to teach us those essential subjects. Even when your teaching left points unanswered and confused, it helped us exercise our brains. And surely that is most important. What matter if we get five different answers if we consider a question five different times, so long as it makes us think? Why should we get disturbed if you blatantly contradict yourself every week?
Also, I must commend your attention to our moral development. I’m sure the angels in heaven must be rejoicing in your attempts to force your brand of Catholicism down everyone’s throats and your disparagement of everyone who was a non-Catholic. And your total devoted persecution of poor deluded atheists like yours truly. If you could not convert us to your point of view, I apologise, Sir. The fault is entirely ours, I may assure you. Also the Hindus, Protestants, and Muslims you insulted every day should be thankful to you, at least, for trying to set their feet on the right path. I am sure they should have internalised the messages you preached against left-handedness and luck. Not to mention evolution and science.
Just as you saw to it that we received a daily dose of anti-Soviet rhetoric that unfortunately left the unregenerate Left of us cold. We were unworthy of you, Sir.
I think it was because we were unworthy that you got us to buy the moral science books you wanted and then locked them up in your cupboard, never again to emerge. We were too unworthy of them, as we were of the library for which you took donations and which likewise disappeared down your private black hole…
It taught me a valuable lesson, Sir, at least. The Bermuda Triangle does exist.
Now, Sir, do you recall how you tried the best for my personal development too? Since I was so poor at studies (it’s indeed odd the examiners in Delhi didn’t think so, but that is their problem) you tried your best to get me to take private tuition from you. The same tuition where you helped your students with questions before exams and whom you appointed monitors, gave roles to in class plays, and helped in contests. How could I have been so ungrateful to have refused to recognise that fact?
How could I have been so blind as to resent your pulling me up in class and ridiculing me every day, while my fellow pupils tittered fearfully and I kept my mind full of Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall? "Hull of a bad, mun. Listen mun, you are going DHOWWWN." It was all for my good. I am to blame, and my father too, for not sending me to you.
All I can say is, I am sorry, Sir.
I’m sorry for resenting you all these years, and I’m glad that when I finally met you again last year I kept my wish to kick your teeth down your throat to myself and talked to you politely. You were, and are, great. Salute.
And I am a product you should be proud of.
Thanks, Sir, again, for all you have done.
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