Coincidence..?!

I think not!

PS: In case you did not notice, I have a TamilMatrimony RSS feed. Lets just say I am preparing myself for reality; trying to rid myself of the illusion that all women in the world are blonde nymphomaniacs with hourglass figure! Also, as you might imagine, its pretty entertaining. Like watching Fantastic Planet on weed

Butter-up

For once, this life which seemed devoid of any direction seems to be shaping up into a life with purpose. I have decided that if I ever make it big, I am going to donate all my wealth to fund research on manufacture of bread slices resistant to Murphy's law (of course, its needless to say that I will blow up gas storage tanks while shouting out "Made it Ma! Top of the world!") .

It was the perfect setting. A man, sleepy and hungry at the same time, rummaging the fridge in search of nourishment. It is all he can could do to butter up two slices of bread. All of a sudden, the lid of the butter container is rolling down and he reaches out for it on an impulse. Next thing you know, you have not one but both the slices bread and a carpet which have exchanged buttery fluids! A lesser man when faced with such a rejection by the bronzed specimen of bread would have taken to a celibate bread-less life or have taken another slice of bread, laced it with strychnine and put an end to the farce that his bread-less life would be. But some of us are made of sterner stuff. We maintain the sang-froid and decide that such a thing shall never happen to us. We decide to devote the rest of our lives to research and make sure that no man who has been born into this beautiful world and breathed the air the good God gave us shall ever face the rejection that we have faced. By Jove, we shall put an end to it!

May the Force be with you!

Whats up?!

Newton meets his friend...

Friend: What's up?
Newton: Well, it's basically the direction of a vector anti-parallel to the net gravitational field vector at any point.

Muhahaha..!

FYI:

Clearly, the man who said that yawning is contagious clearly under-estimated the wisdom of his words. I realized the full import of his wise words, and of course the level of a yawns contagiousness when I was speaking with my roomie over the phone. We were discussing minimum cost routing protocols for procurement of tobacco for the express purpose of injestion of nicotine when suddenly I yawned. The next thing I heard over the phone was a distinct crackling sound of a yawn over the ether, the cause of which I presume was my yawn...

In which Andy expounds on Agenbitology

It was a humid August evening. It turned out that Tucson's local weather-system had had one too many and in a fit of genius which only coffee laced with ethanol can provide, decided that precipitation was the obvious course of action. Of course, Thor was right around the corner when this happened and He being a Norse god who enjoyed good clean fun as much as the next Norse god did, decided to throw in a couple of lightnings as well. However, this meteoro-mythological matrimony didn't last for long, the honeymoon was over and the change in the weather soon came to pass. The Drachman river dwindled from its Amazon-like ferocity to a meandering stream, then to a bunch of puddles and finally breathed its last as the Sun (and not to mention, the drainage system) sucked away the last of its life. As I was witnessing the death of this mighty torrent, my heart was heavy and my brow furrowed, though not for the reasons the reader might assume. My b. was f. because I could sense the slight disturbance in The Force. However, I could not put my finger on the source of the disturbances. With a mind troubled thus I sauntered back to my laptop only to realize that there was a mail from Dope. (Okay, I really don't know why I felt a disturbance in The Force. Probably it's got something to do with the thunderstorm. But the point I am trying to make here is that I got a mail from Dope). Inspired by the link he sent me, I decided it was time someone attempted to codify what the author was talking about.

In order to appreciate Agenbitism (Agenbitology if you prefer to call it a science) one should stop pronouncing words and should start tasting them. Let me elaborate. Wine-tasting 101:
Step 1: Prepare for the wine by drying your tongue
Step 2: Take a sip of the wine and roll it in your tongue. Feel the taste
Step 3: Spit the wine out and take a deep breath in through your mouth. Get the after-taste

I suppose that with this tool in hand, we are in a position to define word-tasting.
Step 1: Analyze your object you are trying to translate to words
Step 2: Let the word roll out of your mouth and try to guage the way the word rolls out.
Step 3: How do your feel now that the word has been uttered. Do you feel the sense of satisfaction at a job well done?

Fairly simple isn't it?! With the basic protocols of experiment in place, I have managed to set out a few guidelines for good-sounding words. I suppose that its pretty obvious that exceptions to these guidelines do exist. Nevertheless, I shall continue..
1) More the number of syllables the better the words are. Obvious one..
2) Words with 'b' sound good - Think about it, 'flabbergasted' and 'bamboozled' have a reassuring wholeness to them which an 'ennui' or a 'shoerack' does not. As soon as you have figured out how to express the general framework of the world with a 'flabbergasting' or a 'bamboozling', your Universe seems that much closer to you than it was before those harmonious words were uttered by you. A sense of satisfaction which only a right word uttered can give you envelopes you and before you know it calmness settles in around you, the wind is blowing a little slower, the leaves ruffle a little lesser, the Earth is revolving a little slower around itself, and to make a long story short, Nature's equilibrium reigns all . And of course, once the word is uttered, the sense of satisfaction is all-prevailing!
3) Words which end in '-ple' sound good. For instance, 'purple' is in some terms the best transformation of a color into the English language. Purple tells you that the colour is extremely friendly, serene and in short, something Jesus Christ would have recommended to one of his disciples had he asked JHC for an opinion on what coloured sash would match his robe. However, that underneath the friendly exterior lies a sinister crux that is waiting to prey on a weak mind is also something that 'purple' expresses which definitely 'porple' or 'pirple' could not have captured in their wildest dreams. Other examples in this category are 'dimple', 'pimple' (I know its gross but then, you know its gross the moment you hear it. The aura of endearment which a 'dimple' provides is non-existent in 'pimple')
4) Words with 'pp' sound good - Although the author of the article seems to think that 'apple' is a good-sounding word, I disagree on this count. On the other hand 'supple' is one word which sounds good. Rolls of the tongue really well and expresses the sentiment like no other word does. What more do you need in a word.

I do understand that more work needs to be done in this field. I suppose our grand-kids will be happy that someone actually took this weighty issue on his shoulder and initiated a formal framework to codify this field!

May the Force be with you!

Curiouser and curiouser...

Inspite of the world's tastiest dishes, and not to mention the plates they are served in, being circular, a wholesome meal is still called a square meal. The injustice being done to infinity and the favouritism shown towards four will want to make a weaker man cry! Stop the bollocks I say!

PS: I must admit that the green chilli enchilada casserole they serve in Cafe Sonora is closer to the square than it is to the square's infinite-edged cousin.

The hunt for the Perfect Square

I am sure there are folks who question the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (gasp!) and there are some who question even the Flying Spaghetti Monster Theory (double gasp!). However, show me a single soul who questions the near-infinite nirvana attainment potential of The Loo (or His Loo-ness or El Loo-rino if you're not into the whole brevity thing) and I shall show you the what it feels like to have the IQ of a marker pen. However, it is for these intellectual philistines that I am jotting down the following for posterity..

Have you wondered, as you finish soul-searching in the holiest of the holy places, cleanse your hands and go for the tissue vending machine, that you hardly ever get the right amount of tissue you need...Let me explain..One square is too little and two is too many. How is it that in all the Loos in all the towns in all the world (I am pathetic..I know!), there is not a single one that doles out the right amount...actually let me correct myself here. There IS one place which actually gets is just about right. The men's restroom in this this bar/restaurant called Old Chicago. So I was at this place the other night and I was wiping my hands with the tissue when I saw the light, the re was a light halo around my head and the next thing I knew Enlightenment was achieved. I said to myself," Ramu, this is the most harmoniously shaped tissue you have in your hands now". It did not strike me till much later to pick up a specimen for public viewing and for laboratory testing.

I have a theory about this though. I think that the perfect square of tissue has to do with the ratio of the the length to the width. I think its either (a) the Golden Ratio, or (b) 2.3809:1. I can almost see you folks thinking "2.3809??..Hunh?! This time he HAS gone off his onions". However a little more mental exertion would bring to the fore the fact that 2.3809 is 1/.42..The more perceptive of you folks know where I am going with it. After all, this number ought to figure somewhere other than in the books!..At any rate, I am going to have to go to the dashed place again and pick up a specimen and find out if it is what I think it is..till then, I suggest that my readers not sit on the edge of their seats biting their nails and that they go about their daily businesses (I know its going to be rather tough). I do realize that I might have spoken too soon. I am going to wait, grok this in fullness and when waiting is filled, I shall expound on it..

Till then, Peace To Thee, my water brothers!

Hmm..where was I??

Owing to those unprintables, Life and research coming in the way of the creative processes involved in the making of quality online-prose, this little page has been untouched in the past few months. However, the Universe, getting bored with the normalcy in my life, it seems decided that it was time She resumed Her favourite pastime and that it was again my turn to get that Googly She bowls us mortal folks every once in a while (I admit She skipped a few to get to Her favourite). And this time, the Googly she bowled me this time was a specimen, a peach of a ball if I might add.

Enough of drivel. Getting to the crux of things, one fine day, as I was checking my mail, I happened to chance upon a mail whose subject read 'Grad Speed Dating'. The initial ponderings about how three simple words from the lexicon which made sense in isolation but didn't make a fleeting iota of sense when put together (others in the list include 'grad-student' and 'financially solvent' and, of course the classic, 'Single Indian grad student' and 'sex') were replaced by a piqued curiosity about the mail's content. With the curiosity piquing happening to a tee, I proceeded to read the mail. It turned out that the Graduate Students Association at my University was helping a grad student with collection of data for her PhD and hence was conducting a speed-dating event for grad students. I can see that readers, at this point, would be having lines on their foreheads trying to understand this leap in logic. However, I swear that it makes sense. I signed up for the event post-haste. What happened next can only be described as the remnants of the digestive process hitting the fan.

The way this speed-dating thingy works is that there are 15 tables where the ladies are seated. The gentlemen get four minutes to chat up with their speed-dates, the end of which is indicated by a whistle (PS: What other pastime does the whistler have? Drawing his mother..muhaha) after which the gentlemen move on to the next table. This particular evening, it was held in the patio of the University's Student Union. With chocolates in every table, bottles of water, a starry sky and a heavy metal band playing in the arena nearby with low-flying jets providing back-up music, the mood was perfect. The time given per date is an interesting number. Although I will refrain from citing articles in Nature, I will impress upon my readers the fact that most people find their soul-mates in the first minute of meeting them. What these researchers failed to realize was that even if people do manage to find that soul-mates of theirs in the first minute, they do not know what to talk to each other for the other three minutes that they are supposed to be speed-dating. A typical conversation:

ARK: Hello. I am Ananth.
Lady: I am The Rock of Gibraltar (since a rose by any other name will smell just as sweet, I will name the generic lady in question 'The Rock of Gibraltar'. Why the Rock of Gibraltar? Because 'hanger', 'deodorant spray' and 'table-lamp' were already taken)
ARK: Good good.
ROG: What did you say your name was?
ARK: Ananth. Thats 'A', 'N'
ROG (after scribbling it down): Aa-hunh..
ARK: 'A', 'N'
ROG (still waiting..): Aa-hunh...
ARK: My name has two 'AN's in it.
ROG: Aah..Sorry about that!
ARK: No problem.
ROG: So what do you do?
ARK: I am doing my PhD in Electrical Engineering
(eventually the topic comes around to this)
ROG: so when will you be graduating
ARK (with an instant spike in the sweat-gland activity): That might take a while...
ROG (understanding dawning in the bosom of this prototypical member of the fairer sex): Thats OK. You hang in there buddy!

(The first minute over, a little bit of shuffling of limbs happens from both parties concerned before...)
ARK: So the weather is getting good these days, isn't it?
ROG(realizing the lack of a shining armour in this specimen and hence concluding that he is not the one): Yeah...I suppose so
ARK(misreading the clues and almost feeling the extra-strong titanium-lined variant of the aforementioned armour shrouding his muscular torso): Oh yeah. I really love this weather. May might be a bit hotter....oh what the heck. I love you. Marry me. Lets name our kids...
(whistle blows. He has drawn his mother!)
Furious scribbling and a frightful frown seen as I leave the table a heart-broken man. Heart mends. Time heals. In this case, it does heal by the time I go to the next table.

Anyways, to make a long story short, Mr. Romeo here managed to get a 'mutual match' which he is sure he will botch up. More to come soon..!

Factorial

Sleeping in the lab can be a psychedelic experience, especially when you have seemingly infinite self-referential dream sequences...

Midi-chlorians

I am all depleted. The light sabre has been out of my hand for quite a bit now really. All I can feel is that shooting pain from all over my body every time The Emperor's Force lightning strikes me as I say "No" to his order to succumb to the temptation, strike down Darth Vader who is lying next to me barely alive (that is if you can call that Frankensteinian agglomeration of flesh and metal life), and give myself up to the Dark side of the Force. Every nerve in my body working over-time sending pain signals to my brain, I find my strength and resolve weakening. "Father..Please help me Father" is all I can say...

"Sir..sir....SIR...will that be a pack of Marlboro Ultralights?", says the desk clerk at the 7-11 to me. A terse "No thank you" later, I walk out of the place.

"Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes."..hehe!

Details..

Thats what sets the God apart from the rest of us, I suppose. What I mean is, if God were one of us, he would (women's lib, feminism and gender equality be darned), every time he got bored and needed an after-evening tea and biscuits-entertainment (or more plausibly, was mighty miffed with the Mrs. for giving him a harrowing time. I mean, barring this, can you think of any other conceivable reason for the existence of Tsunami, mint and chocolate ice cream or Karan Johar's movies?), give you the finger. But when was the last time that happened. It doesn't because that would make him pedestrian. Like you and me. Human. No sir no! He chooses the ripest of times, when you are bonhomie epitomized, when you are stopping to watch butterflies fly past you, doffing your hats to ladies while opening doors to them, when you are thanking your stars, and not to mention the one who got Lady Luck laid last night, for her warmth has shone upon you today, before He thulps the living daylights out of your joie de vivre. What I mean is, he makes it a point to give you a 25% bonus before he gives you a triple coronary arterial blockage. (Its beside the point that most of the bonus ends up toward the repayments of your debts of existence to Satan's scumspawns at the IRS). Another point in case being that He doesn't just let your laptop charger die on you. He makes sure you have spent fifteen dollars on a peach of deal on a laptop bag, and a week after, just when you are stealing glances at reflections in tinted window panes of shops of yourself wearing your new laptop bag and making notes to self on how smart you look, He makes a decision in the negative with regards to the need of that carpet under your feet and decides on executing the Shah Mat of a move - the death of the charger. I reckon, its these minutiae, these fine brush strokes, that make him a brand apart from us mortals. The beauty of it mind-bending really..!

But then, work beckons me. So back to life. Pip-pip, Cheerio, Top of the day to you and the rest of the rot...May the fores and the hinds be with you.

Resistance is useless (if <1Ω)

So I order Cashew Chicken from 'Lucky Chinese', finish my lunch and proceed to the fortune cookies. The fortune I get

Digital circuits are made from analog parts

WTF?!

A google search took me to websites like owlfish.com and anvari.org. And as before Peace to all and may the spores be with you.

Andy: The story of a man and his obsession with Acyclovir

It has been barely hours since I had the last of the anti-virals I was prescribed for shingles and I am starting to miss those tiny buggers already. Am I going too fast for you? Let me back up a bit...So, some time last week, I started developing these rashes on one side of my torso. PS: I do understand that the word 'rashes' is not very high up on the list of things that figure in a work of art. I mean, it is not every day that you pick up a Mills and Boon paperback and flip the pages to find,"..and Rosalinda's hazel eyes were filled with the blazing light of love as she set sight on Jean-Pierre's rash-filled bare chested body". But please be so kind as to excuse the usage this once. PPS: Another reason why you don't see one of these lines in an M&B - you can be pretty sure that anybody with 'Jean-Pierre' for a name is gay..What I mean is that when it comes to sexual preferences, you pretty much seal the kid's fate the moment you name him 'Jean-Pierre' and you know that he is going to be on the lookout for Dominiques, Jacqueses and Guillaumes rather than going for the good old Rosalindas roaming the free world, who I might add are a lot closer to terra firma for us less adventurous blokes. But then, as always, I digress. The point is that after the first couple of days during which the reaction to a rash was more of a 'this discolouration is a pain the arse', changed to something like 'I wonder how long its going to be before I die of this cancerous lesion'. So its with these disturbing thoughts of the Grim Reaper doing whatever the Grim Reapers do to transfer their clientele to the after-world that I went into the triage nurse's office post-haste on the Thursday after the 4th of July holiday. The preliminary examinations by the nurse concluded, I was beckoned into the doctor's office where he asks me to show him my rashes. The ever-obliging gentleman I am, I strip to show him my torso. I am telling him,"My rashes itch and hurt..","These could be boils.." blah blah when he gives me a condscending smile and tells me,"These are not boils or rashes. Its shingles you have." (I could almost hear the background music you hear whenever you are watching a movie and the you see the hero fighting his way through the crowd to rescue his young puppy from the evil clutches of men in the dog pound when he realises that his pup is already dead and that it was his long-lost twin brother who shot it. Its beside the point that the brothers would join forces before the climax and bash up the King of Dogpoundaria who controls all the dog pounds in the world..For the more pedestrian and imaginatively challenged folks, you can always relate to the music that plays when Luke Skywalker finds out that Darth Vader is his father). Anyways, he said that I had shingles and proceeded on to tell me what shingles was. This he starts by saying,"So the Herpes Zoster virus..". The rest of the sentence was lost on me thanks to that one magical word "Herpes". I mean, given that I am a man who has spent pretty much all the time when he was supposed to be getting laid looking on the internet for information on STDs and how to avoid it, it is but natural that I got a jolt when I heard that I was infected with a virus which has 'Herpes' in its name. It was like Thor was trying to wake me up gently with his lightnings. But in the doctor's defence, he did tell me immediately, and I might add barely moments before I started wondering whether people get STDs by dreaming about sex (that's a scary thought, innit?!), that this was not one of those viruses which you hear people talk about and that this is a relapse of chicken pox.

The diagnosis performed, the doctor gives me a week's worth of anti-viral tablets and asks me to dunk in two tablets at a time, five times a day. With four grams of anti-viral getting into your system every few hours, you are bound to have some side-effects right? Well, with me, it was this psychadelic dream I had involving my Royal Enfield 350CC Machismo, naïve pygmy women with suicidal tendencies, other pygmy women who got turned on every time I said "Asyptotic Equipartition Principle" and strangers who offered prize-winning lottery tickets for 50% of the wins (don't even ask). Without going into too much details (which would invariably embarrass you more than it would me), it would suffice to say that popping in those tiny little buggers did to me what alcohol hasn't managed to do in ages. Today, it has been exactly a week since I started indulging in the anti-viral vice and the course got completed yesterday. With little chance of a refill, I think the last of these guys is already in and out of my system. I miss them. Heck, I am in depression. I think I will just go and hang myself from the nearest ceiling. Baah!

PS: I think any suicide note is incomplete without "It's better to burn out than to fade away". So here it is.
PPS: As I was remarking the other day, think of the irony of it. Of all numbers in the world, Pi is not a ROUND number. Why, I ask why?! Just thought I'd mention it before it vapourizes from that little head of mine.
PPPS: You think I am going to kill myself. You wish!..

Hmm..

I was walking back to my office from the student union today after having run a fool's errand for a friend of mine (more about it in a bit..) when I saw this squirrel climbing up a tree. It was just then that I realized that the squirrels here don't seem to have lines on their backs like they do back home. I reckon Jesus Christ, unlike our own Rama, did not need to build a bridges across the oceans...Aah actually I just realized..our Man didn't need bridges. He could walk on water!..

Plagiarism

My friend asked me about my London trip. Had to send a long mail. I decided to just copy and paste the stuff here..A.V.: dont be pissed..

Friday 9th Feb

My first trip outside the U.S. I left from Tucson Int'l airport. I had just scheduled my defense for the first week of March when everyone in my family decides that unless I come and meet them, they were going to disown me (given that I hadn't seen them in two and half years, a rather compelling case can be argued in their favour). With threats of disownment flying in hyperdimensional tetra-cuspidal hypocycloidal curves in the air and having a go at my joie de vivre in its solar plexus, I decided procrastination was no longer an option and started my journey across the Atlantic. Flight from Tucson to Chicago O'Hare was uneventful. Although, I did manage to walk into the ladies toilet in Tucson Int'l (yet again..that brings the grand total to...drum roll...three!. Yup..once in my University, once in MGM in Vegas (I was way too drunk to notice) and this (well no excuses really) ).. Thanks to Douglas Adams, I was doing fine. I was just getting warmed up for some alien sex-scenes with Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple breasted whore from Eroticon Six whose erogenous zone starts some four miles from her and Zaphod Beeblebrox when the flight attendent (double breasted unfortunately) announced that we would be landing soon. So I was in O'Hare.

All this while, I knew that I was going to be in a contraption that was going to have its engine running for 8 hours continuously while flying over water thats not exactly knee-deep. Now, I didn't think too much about this though because I had menial things like life, career and thesis to take care of. However, with the boarding for the international flight along with immigration looming just over my head, I was concerned. I mean, given that my family would sink in water faster than a ton of bricks, I had every reason to be scared! Anyways, once I got into the flight, I thought to myself,"Whats the worst that could happen to me..The engines of the plane could fail dropping you into the Atlantic in which case you make a beeline for the cutest flight attendent in the plane and die like a man. Honour to thee!". With these thoughts to comfort me, I slept like a baby in that Boeing 777.

Saturday 10th Feb
The Saturday I got home was fine. Everyone was happy to see me. It was on Sunday morning that all hell broke loose. My mum decided that a sense of balance is one of those things in life which are strictly optional. She said that either I cut my hair or quit my PhD program and start looking for work (WTF?!). She said,"If you are going to live life by cringing here and not presenting yourself well to others, you should start earning money instead of going for that PhD of yours". The initial polite "fuck-off"s of mine to my mother's suggestions gave way to a politer and more vociferous "okay" once I learnt that there were going to be a few more of those disownment trumps from their side. Even my sister-in-law's mute suggestions that I might keep my hair as long as it was neck-length were unceremoniously vetoed by the elder of the house who by this time was absolutely drunk with the power she had. And so there went my hair along with my brother's 19 pounds. Dash it all I say.

With all the stripping and whipping formalities having been concluded promptly and satisfactorily, we proceeded onto the other thing that we did like any other run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family, thats the constant bickering. Also, we roamed around whenever we had the chance. I roamed around Central London during the week when my brother and sister-in-law would go to work. I dragged along my mum with me on one of those days. Went and saw the usual places: Bond Street (the fashion place), Baker Street (221B the abode of one of the Gods), Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus, National Gallery, Museum of Natural History, Museum of Science and Technology, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park..well thats pretty much it. Aah..I almost forgot, what about that huge fuck-off phallus-Big Ben and the Thames. But these were mostly uneventful. And before I forget, I will neuter any soul that talks about mad European sex. And I am pretty sure the rest of the world doesn't want to know about the only mad European sex I got. I am still a virgin. Need I say more. (In the off-chance you would like me to (wink wink!), call 1-900-SEXY-LADY. Standard rates apply!)

Also, I hogged like a pig that has just escaped from a weight-loss boot camp. Ate Katchhu (Chembu) fry, my favourite dish, after two and half years. Felt like heaven. And all this while, that smart little nephew of mine was cuter than ever. What with his "Shake-your-bottom" routine and ABCD's. I had fun with that kid.

Monday, 25th Feb
Flight back..well my family decided that they were going to embarrass me and came with me all the way till the check-in point where they decided that they were going to give me waves of "tata" along with flying kisses and more than a dash of "we-love-you"s and "we-miss-you"s sprinked in between. With about hundred people watching me and going,"Is he flying to O'Hare or leading a mission to Mars?", I was going red. Anyways, I got into the flight (And no, it doesn't make a difference which side of atlantic you are in. You are going to get the heebie jeebies if you are going to cross it) and got to Chicago O'Hare. Now this is the deal, I had to get through immigration, collect my baggage and go through customs, take the shuttle to the next terminal, check-in and board the flight. And this had to be done in two hours. Luckily for me, there was a snow-storm in Chicago and I was saved. Ended up waiting for an hour before the flight took off.

During this time, my PhD advisor for whom I am grading as well decided to give an exam. With 55 papers in my hands the day I landed, I got back into the groove. But then, some wise man said,"Life is a bitch..and then you die". So back to grad-life.

PS: I observed that the people on the other side of the Atlantic, blacks, whites, browns, Chinese , absolutely everyone has bigger noses. (actually it takes a little more than being on the other side of the Atlantic for the Chinese to have larger noses). I wonder why.

The defense was not too bad. It was on 3/6 Tuesday at 2. My boss asked me to meet with him on Monday afternoon. After going through my presentation, he gave me changes at 5:30 in the evening which took me till 9:00 in the night to finish. In one of my slides, I was dealing with some 50 objects and 9 steps of animation. Enough to drive a man crazy. That done, I went to the local convenience store and got grub for the committee members to chew on when listening to my defense. Thoughts of lacing it with some alcohol did cross my mind. That, however did not materialize. I was supposed to give a mock presentation at 10 in the morning on the day of the presentation. After going through my material slide by slide(thats euphemism for ass-rape), I was given changes at 11:15 which took me till 1:15 to finish. And what with this terrible cold that seemed to have crossed the Atlantic along with me, I was getting the shivers. But it did pass and I managed to give a talk which if not enlightening the world (meaning the 3 people other than my 5 committee members who wanted to attend my presentation), at least didn't make them leave the room more confused. So I am reasonably happy with my effort.

So at this point in time, I have crossed the atlantic a virgin (Virgin Atlantic hehe..) and have an M.S. degree. Now where is that 2 crore dowry of mine..Oh fuck I forgot, I am not a golt!


Anyways, may the spores be with you.

PS: In case you are wondering (and I know you are), Eccentrica Gallumbits doesn't have sex with Beeblebrox. At least not the way they would have had Irwing Wallace or Ken Follett written the book.

Aaah..now I get it..Actually I don't!

"This is a capitalists' plot to undermine the Revolution" - Khrushev. "This is a part of Sa-damn's plan to acquire nukelar weapons of mass destruction" - George W. Bush. "This is a conspiracy of the Pakistani terrorists" - our very own "Captain" Vijaykanth. Thats what these people would have had to say about the concept of graduation had they attended grad school. You ask me why I feel this way. What is a man to do when, two and a half years and 94 pages into his thesis, his advisor points out a new, and worse than that, an elementary view order which he had overlooked, and when he simulates it gets results that better the ones he has published, and more importantly, has in his THESIS. In the words of Agent Smith,"What do you do Mr. Krishnovich, what do you do?". Imagine a man stranded in an island (and for convenience, we shall assume that there are NO naked women in the island, so he has all the reason in the world to get the hell out of there. If there were, I don't see why he would even dream of it..but then, as always, I digress..). What if he sees a ship in the distance - the only flaw in the scenario being that the ship doesn't see him. Imagine his WTF-ness at that point in time..Believe you me my friends when I say that I would gladly trade places with that man at the blink of an eyelid.

But damn it all! As long as I know I have a closed form for the recording density for Contraint 6 (its a different issue I can't get a limit as n tends infinity, but that shall be in another post), I don't care too much of a fuck!

PS: Things have changed since the time I claimed to have found the recording density for Constraint 6. Turns out I haven't..so..back to square one.

Where do I start?!

Before I start with my share of rantings for the fall season, a brief synopsis of what has happened since Boxer briefs, Gayathri Joshi and psychadelic dreams involving romantic rendezvous (thats the plural /rän-di-"vüz/. I just couldn't resist this one) with irrational numbers.

August 2,
After flying for what seems to be an eternity, I come home and realize that the way my apartment number looked and sounded seemed vaguely familiar. Its the kind of feeling you get when you are waiting in line and all of a sudden you realize that you have heard the voice of the old lady standing next to you somewhere before. Its only hours later when you are tossing and turning in bed trying to figure out who it was when you realize that she was the lady who, armed with rather compelling statistics, was egging you on last week to buy and try the latest breakthrough in chest-hair removal technology "brought to you c/o your very own Acme Labs" (the worst part of it being that you did buy it and remember thinking that at the price of only half your monthly salary, it was a steal!) or that she was the rather comely "barely-teen" female you spoke to last Saturday on one of those 1-900 numbers that promise to make a man out of you by the time you are through with the call. At any rate, the bottom-line -- I didn't know what the number was and wasn't any closer to the answer two weeks after I moved in. Its one of those things that just doesn't budge from the back of your mind where it seems to have lodged itself. Imagine my WTF-ness when I take my friend home one day and as we enter my apartment, he says," Dei, your apartment number - #314...Thats Pi..or at least something like it"! FYI: I also realized that there are rather interesting patterns in Pi.

August 2/3..around 12AM (Thats midnight for all the confused folks)
I check my mail. Over time, this task that has, due to abundance of bandwidth and absolute lack of contacts (I still consider this a conspiracy the US of A and the terrorist networks of Pakistan have hatched against me to undermine my importance), has degenerated into a ritual that has no meaning whatsoever. I am reminded of an old Tamil saying which roughly translates to "The man who has too much Sandalwood extract with him is eventually going to wash his arse with it". Anyways, I digress.. So it turns out I have a mail from my advisor and that I have a meeting with my advisor the next day. Next day, I reach my advisors den posthaste. Three hours of grilling, one thesis proposal and six months' worth of research arrears on my back later, I stagger out of her den a broken man. All dreams of speaking fluent German or serenading to the descendants of the Venetian life-forms that crash-landed onto Earth one fine day with my guitar or being able to dole out information on the literal, metaphorical and the hyperbolic interpretations of the Rig Veda that has transcended the generations (I am alluding to the "Spoken German 101", "Basic Guitar Method" and "Sanskrit-101" that I was planning on taking this semester) seemed to have gone down the drain.

August-end/September-ish,
Thesis is going on fine..One fine day, Dope and I start thinking,"What if sinorgams are stored instead of images?". We run simulations, get ammazing results and are basically on the verge of hitting upon something, although not out there with C=B.log(1+P/N), isn't as bad as "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension". The literature survey which we needed to have done first didn't come till after three hours of simulations. Literature survey told us that we had been a little late (by about 5 years!), the worst part of it being that this was EXACTLY what we had done..not a subset of our work, not work related to our work but THE SAME FUCKING THING! Essentially it was God's way of saying what David Gilmour's enemies told him when he opened his doors to them and asked them if they could wipe the slate off clean.

A few days later, the thesis still going on fine. This was when hit upon another idea. We thought,"What will happen if you take one revolving chair, one foot-long scale, five metres of LAN cable, ten lines of MatLab script, a printer, llots of adhesive tape, a camera and someone who can sit still for a rrrreally long time without moving and add to it two penniless grad students with lots of free-time in their hands". We were expecting this. Unfortunately, we hadn't realized that we had also added a dash of "fuck-up" to the mixture. Hence it blew up right on our faces. What we were left with is this.

In lay terms, we were planning to use photographs taken at many angles and then use filtered back-projection reconstruction to render the surface of the subject. Rathna, the ever-impassive figurehead of SPACL decided to volunteer for this. Two hours and kazillion minute movements of the revolving chair later, we had 128 photographs of Rathna. This was when we realized that we weren't able to isolate the background from the images. Next best thing was a custom-made animation of Rathna in a stop-motion animation sequence.

September 6,
I wake up early in the morning and heading towards the holiest of holy places, I realize that there is a rather painful lump nudging up somewhere in the niche which rarely sees the light of day. One uncomfortable walk to Campus Health, an embarassing meeting with the triage nurse and a painful doctor's probe later, I am sitting in front of my laptop with links google search-strings like "Lump in the buttocks", "Haemmorhoids" (which confuses google into asking me "Is it "hemmoroids""), "cure for hemmoroids" and "Dietary fibers". Seven days of excruciating pain which is there pretty much all the time, constant declining of offers to "take a seat" everywhere I go (where was this politeness when I needed it??) and countless visits to the restroom whenever it was "lotion time", the excess baggage with me still wasn't showing any signs of receding. FYI By this time, I was resigned to a lifelong relationship with Mr. Bulgy Polypson. Without going into more details, it would suffice to say that on September 11, from Andy, I had transformed into "Andy minus one thrombosed hemmoroid plus one huge gauze". Boy was I glad that I had courage enough to let a stranger with a knife near my preciouss!

Somewhere in between all this, our quiz club managed to win a free DVD player and thanks to one particular chetaa, our group ended up with the hosting of the next quiz that we need to do some time in September. But then SHIT happens and shall be taken care of..

..And as always Peace to All..

PS: I forgot, I am not going to rant this time after all...

Mujhe pyaar huaa allah miya...

I just saw 'Swades'...and I fell in love with the only saving grace of the movie..Gayathri Joshi. In the eternal words of Thalai, "Kaadhalin 1000 watts bulbe ethinaale en nenjil"! Apart from the usual melodrama, the constant rant about how everyone should ask what they have done for the country, the silly turn-around-and-gaze-with-sleepy-eyes looks of SRK, the cheesier-than-the-world's-largest-mousetrap dialogues about sanskar, parampara and the rest of the works we have been listening to in all the Jai Hind movies(PS: The award still goes to Arvind Swamy for that extinguish-the-flag scene with the crescendo of ARR running in the background in 'Roja'. God! I was so embarassed I was about to tear the skin off my body), there wasn't anything else to the movie other than that PERFECT figure of Gayathri (my doll).

This brings me to the main ranting of mine. How long are we going to cling on to the same old horse-shit that MK Gandhi & JN talked about. Its fine for 10 year old kids who have but the slightest idea about their identities. But please why us grown-ups. Why?! Call me crazy but I am a lllittle more aware of the situation in India than a 10 year old. I say India is fucking filled to the brim with corrupt politicians and officials, poverty and illiteracy and what do the optimists have to tell me.."we have parampara and sanskaar"..."We are the oldest civilization in the world". Just one thing people, you have been sitting on that for a lllong time. Its time to get up, scrap the shit you give yourselves off your ass and move forward! Ah and before I forget, all those things we rant about are strengths only if we can use them. If not, its as good as a bumpy ride through the roads of Nanganallur-a pain in the arse!

But then ranting about such weighty matters do not become me..so I shall laze around, think about Gayathri babe and say to one and all," Peace to you matey!".

You can never be too safe with these jewels...

One of the most profound articles written in recent times...I saw this on MSN. I think it was this that Gollum referred to as," My preciouss"!

In Praise of Boxer Briefs

An underpants manifesto.

By Seth Stevenson

It's come to my attention that there are some men out there—even a few friends of mine—who've not yet switched to boxer briefs. These are otherwise intelligent fellows who, either through ignorance or recalcitrance, begin each day by pulling on (shudder) traditional boxers or (double-shudder) briefs. I feel great pity for these men. Because the irrefutable truth is that boxer briefs—a knit, mid-thigh-length compromise between boxer and brief—are the ultimate male netherwear. The sooner you accept this, the happier your crotch will be.

It's not too late to change. We humans have a terrific capacity for adapting to new underpants. I know, because I've switched styles twice now. Consider my first (though ultimately misguided) underwear revelation:

The time was the mid-1980s, and I was an impressionable tween. I'd worn briefs all my life—those classic, white-cotton Y-fronts—without giving the issue much thought. And then one evening I saw an episode of Moonlighting in which Bruce Willis (as detective David Addison) was somehow de-pantsed (an event which occurred with some frequency on the show, as I recall). He was shown wearing a pair of generously cut, broadcloth boxer shorts, emblazoned with large red hearts.

The billowy boxers were meant to look anachronistic and silly. But this joke was lost on me. Compared to my briefs—which revealed my pale and scrawny pre-teen upper thighs—those modest, roomy boxers looked positively dignified. And cutting-edge, too: My father didn't wear them, thus by definition they were modern and stylish. (I didn't realize at the time that baby-boomer men had switched to briefs in large part to tack away from their own boxers-wearing fathers.)

Soon after, I made the leap. And by the end of high school, in the early 1990s, every teenager I knew was wearing woven cotton boxers. (Often carefully showcased—allowed to peek out below the hem of a pair of shorts.) It's still not clear what sparked this large-scale boxer rebellion. Surely not every young man of my generation was so profoundly affected by Moonlighting. (Though underwear fashions do seem particularly pegged to pop culture. There's that old saw about Clark Gable killing undershirt sales in 1934, when he unbuttoned his shirt in It Happened One Night to reveal a bare chest. Likewise, it was Monica Lewinsky's thong flash that seemed to really galvanize women's rejection of the granny-panty. Theory: Since underwear is concealed in day-to-day life, and we can't see what our neighbors and co-workers are wearing, we have only pop culture to give us our cues.) Nonetheless, boxers remained the near-universal choice of my generation throughout college and into the years beyond.

I now realize, of course, that those were wasted years, groin-comfort-wise. All that time, a better option had awaited. Although by 1993 those iconic Mark Wahlberg print ads for Calvin Klein boxer briefs were in heavy rotation, the famous query put to Bill Clinton in 1994 ("boxers or briefs?") didn't even acknowledge a third possibility. I was aware that the boxer brief existed, yet my naive understanding held that it was a choice open only to the European or the gay.

It wasn't until a forward-thinking friend clued me in ("It's the best of both worlds," he enthused) that I was made aware of the cut's functional superiority. Soon enough, I switched again—this time for good. After just a few days, I could see the boxer brief's profound advantages:

Support. The obvious, yet oft-unspoken flaw with traditional boxers is their lack of cuppage. They are useless for athletic events, and can even be a hindrance. (An acquaintance refers to the "tunnel" created by wearing boxers under soccer shorts. Via this tunnel, one's testicles can gain sudden and direct access to the world outside.) Boxer briefs hold your goods in place and out of sight.

Stability. Traditional boxers never sit still. They are forever riding up above the waistband of your pants, or slipping down below it. That loose fabric tends to twist, and bunch, and wedgify. Constant realignments are required. (This is especially true with the "bubble-butt" cut of boxer, which uses a spinnaker-like central back panel. The idea is to avoid having any seams line up with the butt-crack, but all that extra cloth just crawls up in there anyway, to disastrous effect.)

Containment. That simple slit of a fly on traditional boxers encourages a phenomenon I will term "flop-out." Some boxer shorts seek to rectify this with a button enclosure, but a button is the last thing you care to deal with when you urgently need to urinate. Boxer briefs use the much more effective and user-friendly Y-front.

Aesthetics. My unscientific polling suggests that ladies dig 'em. While it has all the comfort, support, and fit of a knit brief, the boxer brief's full-cut thigh lends it the modesty of a traditional boxer. And that thigh is functional, too—its snug, ribbed cuff serves to hold the garment in place. This prevents the boxer brief from riding up or (worse) burrowing into one's posterior cleavage. (The Calvin Klein boxer brief is particularly well-tailored, and is my personal choice. I own one pair of boxer briefs from 2(x)ist, bought at the little store in my gym when I forgot to bring a change of underwear, but I find they take an overly presentational approach to the genitalia. Sort of a push-up effect.)

I'm confident there's really nothing the boxer brief can't do better. But just to make sure, I recently revisited the other underwear alternatives, to see if I was missing something.

Step 1 in my research was to buy a pair of Brooks Brothers briefs in a lovely, mercerized white cotton for $14.99. When I first slipped them on, I found them incredibly comfortable. And even a bit stylish, with that racy curve tracing the cup of the buttock. But all the old problems pertained. I felt naked, and also like a 7-year-old. I could tell that the bright white cotton would quickly dull to beige. Worst of all, the briefs crept way up over the course of a long day. Verdict: Too tighty, and too soon not-whitey.

Next, I picked up a pair of plaid boxers from Burberry's for $45. I felt as dapper as anyone can feel when dressed only in underwear. But the boxers simply wouldn't remain in place under my pants, always migrating 30 degrees around my waist in one direction or the other. The leg-openings would ride up and accordion, leaving weird marks on my thighs. And while Burberry's model prevented "flop-out" with a button enclosure, I found myself leaving the button undone. Who wants the bother? Verdict: Classic preppie choice—looks sharp, underachieves.

I've also tried trunks. There seems to be some disagreement as to what this term means, but my understanding is that trunks have an abbreviated thigh-length and no fly opening at all. I bought two pairs that qualify while traveling in the Netherlands last year. (I'd run out of clean underwear. The vast majority of men's underwear purchases, I suspect, are born of desperate and immediate need.) Trunks have many of the same benefits as boxer briefs, but I can't understand the lack of a fly opening. Standing at a urinal, you're forced to reach through the fly of your trousers and pry the trunks' elastic waistband down with your thumb. Should you lose your purchase on the waistband, it will snap back violently—with messy and painful results.

Some men endorse going commando. I find it thoroughly unhygienic. Also rife with potential for injury. No dice.

I couldn't bring myself to try on a thong. I realize this is a viable choice for some men these days (perhaps even some straight men), but it's just not for me. I have no need to prevent panty lines. And, more fundamentally: Half of what I'm looking for from underwear is wedgie avoidance. What is the thong if not a permanent wedgie? No doubt, future generations of men will adopt the thong as a comfortable, minimalist alternative and will urge me to ditch my fusty old boxer briefs.

Until then, I beseech you: Make the boxer-briefs switch. You, and your groin, will not be sorry.

Muhahaha

Someone actually told me that my singing "was not bad" and that I could "pull the tune off". For someone whose larynx has been acknowledged in his friends' circle to be the house of the aural plague that Mr. 666 created in his moment of artistic perfection and unleashed on the world as the ultimate weapon against all that was good and God's own, this is rather comforting.

Laments and Musings

As the Cumuli and the Cumulonimbi shrouding the sun finally decide that Newton was right after all, and then in one "Aah what the hell!" dash come swooping down on the more rational forms of matter which have either had a more resigned attitude towards Sir Isaac all along or are still miffed with the darned apple for having fallen in the first place (basically, it was raining), of course, none of which I can see from the wall-locked cubicle of mine, I realize that the season of lament has begun. Having done my share of the work from the first phase of my project and my wits' end on the rather pesky problem that creeped up from nowhere in the next phase,I realize that there is nothing more to be done here anytime soon and get started with another one of my meandering streams of thought. I am no more philosophical than the next bloke but its when these things happen to you that you get a deep understanding of what Bertie was talking about everytime one of his chums who was off his onions would come and ask him to propose to a rather loony specimen of the gentler sex on his behalf or everytime he is sitting in his bath and splashing around his scrub when the air of joie de vivre turns foul, a sense foreboding shows itself somehere below the belly, soon is all over him and all too suddenly he gets a telegram from his Aunt Agatha saying," I will be in London today and will be lunching with you". Its as if Fate decides that its at the peachest of times that she would have a go at you in the neck! But I digress..

The point is this. I am a month away from completing my internship. I have made decent money, brought myself a laptop and on the whole life was going okay. As I was telling my friend the other day, it was the time when "all's well with the world, everyone is in good shape, the yin and the yang are in homeostasis, Ahura and the Daevas are at peace and its one of those cheery days when one would like to have egg and bacon made from pigs that died contended with their life of charity...but then, life here had ceased to have flow of any kind, a kind of stupor if I might say so..which in a way is a good thing". So come August 1, its back to grad-school and the life of worries, constant penury, budweiser weekends and research. But at least, there is a sense of moving forward with life. At any rate, I don't think I will have to worry about weighty issues like trying to write code to distinguish bi-modal projection profiles from mono-modals and will finally be able to close my eyes without having ridges, whorls, deltas, minutiae and frequency modulated Gabor envelopes hovering before them. in grad-school, its going to be pseudo-inverses and Bx, By and Bz's in rotational frames of reference! But truth be told, it really ain't as bad as that. In fact, I wouldn't mind too much if the Bz's danced with PIs to a few Waltzes :-).

Right now, its back to work...peace to everyone.

I had the most psychadelic dream today. I don't quite remember what the dream was about but I distinctly remember telling myself that I was dreaming and that the only thing I needed to do to take charge of things was to open my eyes and wake up. I tried and I tried but my eyes just wouldn't open. Freaky...

Scenes from a Memory

Its an outpost lost in space and time. A frontier noone but the aggressors and the defenders of this fort remembers..And they are not rising in number. Hell even the soldiers here don't seem to have more than a fleeting memory of who or to what end they were fighting for. All they sensed at this moment was the true animal instinct of killing for survival, oftentimes degenerating into a simple base, unadulterated thirst for blood.

This was the setting for Major Anantharaman Krishnan's and Major Sajeendra Das's stand of defiance. They had been through a lot. They went to the academy together. They fought in the inter-planetary war. They were the ones to escort the principal signatories of the instrument of surrender to Mars (Nothing like parading through steets filled with jeering Martian, or "Greater Humans" as they liked to call themselves, to bring two self-respecting soldiers to the brink of suicide).

Ramu was thinking. He also knew that Saju was thinking the same thing. This was their turn to gain what was rightfully theirs - their dignity. All that was stopping them was this sea..no this galactic swarm of soldiers. The situation was grim. The food supplies were getting shorter by the day. With the supply lines hit, things were not going to get any better.

It wasn't too rosy for the Martians either. With nothing but acres of shrubery between them and two trigger-happy ace-snipers on a streak of murderous vengeance, they were not in the best of spirits. The Generals, it seemed to the Martian, were opting for the "big-push" strategy rather than using a little prudence. Generals will be Generals.

"Ramu, I am out.", cried Saju from the other side of the barrier. Ammunition was not easy to come by. The pockets of dead soldiers had run out long ago. Every once in a while, brave, desperate, foolish soldiers crept into no-man's land in the hopes of ammo. It didnt matter any more whose bullets they were. Most times they got their butts blown away. Other times they got lucky and the world as these soldiers knew it was at peace for a few more days.

Ramu threw his cartridge. Forty bullets. That was forty less soldiers he'd have to worry about. Saju had always had a keen eye. Barrages of bullets came their way. Once they put their eyes to the scope, it took more than a few bullets whizzing past them to make them flinch. Thing got a little out of hand sometimes. Too many people and too little time meant sometimes they would have to go for their standard issues. Sometimes it was hand-to-hand. They did feel bad to break strangers' necks but then some things had to be done.

Time wears on. How long has it been. days? weeks? months? Now that the war has been won, their treasures won back, they were in a different era with different fights to be fought and different frontiers to be conquered. This time it was the Magrathea. This time they didn't have guns with them. Instead it was strains of algae they were going to use to terraform the planet for human living.

It was a long journey to the spaceship. His mind was blank. He knew how things were going to be. Chances of success were remote. The actual travel was going to be a cakewalk; unless something really disastrous happened, they were going to sleep through most of it. Once there, they would be in-charge of strategically placing these strains to absorb the atmospheric gases and enrich it with water and oxygen.

As the boosters roared to life and he jerked in his seat, all he could remember was the conversation he had with his boss. He had asked her for cyanide in case he needed it if something went awry in there. All she said was," You don't need that. All you have to do is get into space and open your visor. You would not know what hit you. You know why. Because you would be too busy evaporating."

The injustice of it all...


(Author's note: What can I say. I even dream H2G2. I have a problem!)

Back to my roots(?)

Run Forrest Run!

Ran the Eden Family 5K Run. Did it in 24:05. I was rrreally proud of myself..that is till I found the best time...16:43! Finished a dismal 51st of 140 men running. But screw it all, I say!


Me at the start...


and me at the finish line...run Forrest run!!

My latest buys...Cant wait to lay my hands on them:
Maugham: Collected Short Stories : Volume 1 and Complete Yes Prime Minister.

"It used to be said there were two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of Ministers: one sort that folds up instantly, the other sort goes round and round in circles."
-Bernard Wooley

PS:

Life has been too kind to me today..I DID have a need to pee in the middle of a three-hour meeting...And I excused myself and walked out! Hows that for employee empowerment.

Marlboro bye-bye

The funny thing about smoking is that before you start smoking, your life is satisfied (yeah the craving for sex is still there..but hey who can blame me for that!). And then you take that one cigarette and life somehow seems better. Then you quit smoking and you expect that life would go back to how it was before. But then it doesn't, does it?! The craving for nicotine-minus (thats the stereo-isomer that works..Am'nt I the next Einstein!) works differently.

Think of it this way.Have you had that itch in the small of your back that you can't seem to get to! And the only way you are going to get to it is if you put your hands in your back and wiggle your torso around as if you were trying to catch a dog having a go at you because it has been led into thinking that the nape of your neck is the piece of steak the local butcher had promised it last week, or if you rub your back against the nearest wall you can find (Thats going to look elegant)...Or that rather urgent call of nature you need to answer that you get ten minutes into the three hour meeting with the CEO of your company. It doesn't hurt you. You can live with it. But boy will you you be cross with life or what! This craving is like that. You will go about your life like nothing happened. But when the craving hits, hits you like a sock filled with wet sand.

To write or not to write...!

This is more or less my predicament at this point in time!

Dream come true!

I think this is the single thought every boy has had at some point in time or the other. What does the bloody ladies' restroom look like! It's not so much a curiosity as it is a masochistic pleasure to have this motherlode of sacrosanct knowledge of the Holy Temple(!!) known to him. The crux of the matter - I got to know what it DOES look like, first hand, 3D! That's one dashed thing off my list.

What happened was this. There is this restroom that I use before and after my meetings on Monday. This Monday, I went in and the place had changed! I could see no urinals and the place was painted PINK. I agree that given that a man's bean is at its ripest in the vicinity of a potty, my brain must have lit up like a Christmas tree and should have pleaded to me to get my heinie out of that place in a flash. Alas, that did not happen and all I thought was," That was one FAST renovation!". This in mind, I went to the potty (shrouded from the evil world by a curtain!), having let go of that unspeakable burden, having had that "moment of clarity", I proceeded to wash my hands. I looked for the paper towel that was supposed to be next to the sink and did not find it. What was in it's position instead was a shiny vending machine that said "Napkins - 25 cents; Feminine Tampons - 50 cents". There are a few things in life, for instance, seeing Ms. September in her elements in person or realizing that a St. Bernard is following you with the sole intent of exhibiting your insides to the rest of the world, that can jolt out a man out of mental malaise by the time he can say floccinaucinihilipilification. I would place these words very high in such a list. Anyways, the point is that, at this moment my state was similar to that of Ms. Mia Wallace after that adrenaline shot she got! I got the fuck out that place in the time it takes to say floccinaucicihilipilification!