Fidgety Foots

Disgruntled parents havent taken kindly to their pampered brats not being selected for the school basketball team, so they petitioned everyone except Lord Ganesha to get the coach fired. These parents need to get a life and a reality check. What kind of message are they giving their kids? That its ok to be incompetent and still have your way? Yeah, I know it is pretty common, but dont you think half the reason is due to overbearing, rich, uber-protective parents like these? I mean we have a President selected on that merit and see where that has gotten us.

Hmm, lets see, my kid sucks at basketball, but I am gonna make sure he/she gets on the team. After that I am gonna change their diapers as well so that they dont soil their underpants on court playing against a team with some real talent.

Actually, the only reason the parents didnt petition Lord Ganesha is probably ’cause he is a Hindu God and they never heard of him.

…desi ishtyle. Thanks, Archana!

How would you distinguish between grunting and heavy breathing? Well, it is a pretinent question now that it can get you kicked out of a gym. NY Times also has an article on it (free registration required).
I visit a gym regularly for cardio workouts, and I personally have no problem with someone grunting while trying to get that last extra rep in. Where it starts getting out of hand is when the guy grunts from the way go, finishes up with a huge bellow, slams the weight down and then looks around to make sure he is being watched. My other pet peeve is the sweat machine who think leaving remanants of their body fluids on the machines helps lube them up for the next user, three words for you buddy, “Use a towel”.

However, I am not sure about formulating regulations and forcing individuals to behave in a certain way. Awareness of social etiquette isnt something that should be forced down peoples throats, you either get it or you dont. If you dont, then you are just a redneck (Hey, I said I have a problem with social regulations, not with calling people unjustified crude names)!!

What what do you do if you break your writing hand and need to fill out those hospital forms? Write slowly!! In fact that is exactly what a hospital in India said.

I’ve heard this statement at least three times in the last month, the month that I hit the not-so-big three-oh.

I guess I’m lucky. I turned 30 in an age when 30 is 20. And I was 20 when 20 was 20, so I’m going to be 20 for 20 years :). Pat-pat on the not-so-old back.

Did we replace fustiness with freshness? Or wisdom and grace with awkward immaturity? Are we just fooling ourselves by vanity sizing our age?

Louis Menand says it well in this article :
[...] The point is that mental and physical development never stops, no matter how old you are, and development is one of the things that make it interesting to be a being. We imagine that we change our opinions or our personalities or our taste in music as we ripen, often feeling that we are betraying our younger selves. Really, though, our bodies just change, and that is what changes our views, our temperament, and our tolerance for Billy Joel. We can’t help it. The chemistry has altered.

P.S. Do a google search for “thirty is the new twenty”. I promise you’ll be entertained.

Use your news, coz it’s on toilet paper! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2917739.stm.

More stuff like this at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2054692,00.asp

Sania Mirza. Gotta feel for the lady. She wears a skirt on court because she happens to be a professional tennis player and she gets put in the spot by fundamentalist-intellectually-challenged-contaminants-to-the-human-gene-pool. Now, she makes news because she happens to be wearing a hijab. People need to get a life (and some English lessons) instead of turning it into a hindu-muslim issue as this forum has become.

But then isnt it a symptom of a malady of Indian society where a womans choice of apparel for the day somehow is everybody else’s business? For some reason the prevalent attitude is that if a lady wears revealing clothes and behaves in a manner considered unbecoming of Indian culture then it gives every horny pervert the right to eve-tease and sexually molest/assualt her.

He bleeped!

I’m listening to Bush’s morning after speech and press conference on NPR. After his refusal to even consider defeat and his scathing denunciation of democrats in pre-election interviews, it’s not surprising that he’s getting bristly and defensive.

He’s said nothing inappropriate, but there was a bleep just now. Hmmm……wonder if its a bad-word bleep or a somebody-pushed-a-button-somewhere bleep.

Today, we watched the new Don. Yes, you can continue reading this post, no spoilers here. The movie was alright - very stylized and slick with an unexpected twist at the end…but I still wouldn’t rate it as theatre-worthy, wait and watch it on DVD. And no one, no one! can do Khaiyke Paan Banaras Wala like the big B.

I also realized that I can’t tell the difference between John Abraham and Arjun Rampal. Is that bad? Judge for yourself before you “gasp!…how can you?…..”.

Confucion says - “hunky man looks all same”.

Are you against the Iraq war? Well, then you are a terrorist. Do you think its wrong that Dubya and his team have managed to completely circumvent the US constitution and the Geneva conventions? Well, then you are a terrorist. Its amazing isnt it? These guys have gotten away with, in my opinion, impeachable offences and yet they have the gall to day-after-day preach about how anyone with a differing opinion is an enemy of the state. Great column in the SF Chronicle about this.

But they are getting desperate now. Oh boy are they ever. How else do you describe the mob-like clamour by Bush and company to pimp out Kerry’s botched joke as the reason why voting for the “other” party will be apocalyptic for the nation. Now, it is pretty obvious to any semi-intelligent individual that Kerry delivering a joke is as disastrous as letting Barry Bonds lead investigations into a drug scandal. But the GOP have tried to exploit it in the hopes that it will camouflage how their fiscal ineptitude, bloated bureaucracy, and gallactically mis-managed, ill-conceived war will affect the future generations to come. But then as Thomas Friedman writes, they do hope that the American voter is less than semi-intelligent.

And finally, on my way to work today I was reading this article. Here is Don Sherwood, incumbent congressman from Pennsylvania, married with three kids. President Bush campaigned for him going on record declaring,”I’m pleased to be here with Don Sherwood, he has got a record of accomplishment”. Oh yes, does he ever. This bozo was accused of trying to CHOKE HIS MISTRESS and willingly settled for $5.5 dollars, and here is the best part, he is campaigning as a “family-values conservative”. And these are the conservative hypocrites that are worried about how gay unions will destroy the sanctity of marraige.

These two cartoons that I read in TIME say it all (plenty more where they came from).