Best Indian Movie Fight scene. EVER.

Now, I just happened to notice a list of 9 lamest fight scenes ever on blogfaction; not surprisingly, there are not one, but TWO Indian Fight scenes. And coming in at #1, the BEST movie fight scene according to the list is...

(I know they call it lamest, but I'm beaming with pride at an Indian movie coming at #1 at anything. In my mind, that makes it the best, by default.)



With due respect to the list (and it is a good one), I have a personal favorite. Maybe because it's in my language, and you have the added bonuses of poetry, dance and traditional music. Plus the most handsome man in Tamil movies, T R. Don't miss the acrobatic showboating before each fight. And the most AWESOME taunt EVER towards the end:

Vaadaa yen machchi,
Vaazhakkaa bajji,
won odambe pichchi
potuduven bajji

Which translates to:

Come on my friend
Plantain tempura
I'll tear your body
and fry it into a tempura.

I'm overwhelmed...

Unions - Welcome to the Obama White House!!!

Got to keep reminding myself not to get overexcited...

But, man, I have been following the last 10 days of this new administration, and honestly, this new administration keeps blowing me away. They're clear about what they want to do, and its not just making the right sound bites. They are doing the right things. But still when I hear the POTUS say "The labor movement is not part of the problem, it's part of the solution" (about 6:40 into the video), or the VP say "To our friends in organized labor: Welcome back to the White House", boy, that sure does sound great.

A task force for the middle class? BAM!
The Lily Ledbetter act signed into law? BAM!!
Gitmo closed? BAM!!!
Reversal of the Anti-abortion funding policy? BAYYYAAAMMMM!!!!

Talk about ending not just the farcical "War on Terror", but also ending the war on the labor movement, the war on women, the war on science...

(a personal favorite : Michael Griffin, the NASA chief? His ass is grass. Deservedly so.)

Lily Ledbetter's (finally fruitful) efforts reminded me of Rosie the Riveter:

Man Vs. Food - the hot curry eating episode

Now I don't know if you've seen this show Man Vs. Food on the travel channel before. First off, what's up with the channel? First it was Andrew Zimmern, who made his millions eating chicken assholes in some Korean alley.Then it was Anthony Bourdain, who did exactly the same thing in a less jolly manner on a different time slot. And now there's Man Vs. Food with Adam Richman. Why don't they just fire Samantha Brown and rename the channel "The weird channel where you can see people eat stuff you really shouldn't be eating."?

Anyway, so the whole premise about the show, as far as I can make out, is that this dude Adam goes about to various parts of the country and eats at local eats and competes in food challenges. The guy seems reasonably affable and portly - which is surprising, because given what he does, he should weigh 450 and have sausages instead of veins. But I've seen him eat a 4.5 lb steak, a 5.5 lb pizza, and almost down a 7.5 lb burger. That's like eating a baby. Coming from a country where there are lots of people who genuinely have little to eat, this much excess is truly repulsive to me. At least with Zimmern, there seems to be a respect for food that nourishes us, even if the food is composed of aviary posteriors. What you have here is a show where your meal is a foe that needs to be vanquished. Its a weird concept.

All this eaten by one man - episode from somewhere in TX:



But you really should see the show if you have a morbid sense of humor. ANY doubts you had about why the hell we are such a fat and sickly country will be immediately and permanently dispelled. Most of the episodes are shot in the South (huh, who'dve thunk THAT?) in ordinary, inexpensive, popular joints. You should just see the patrons of these various eateries stuff their faces with enough meat and fat to reconstitute a small mammal. You KNOW they're going to get their fourth heart attack some time in the next few months, and honestly, I don't care. EXCEPT THAT IT DRIVES UP MY INSURANCE PREMIUMS EVERY TIME YOU HAVE TO CALL IN THE FIRE DEPARTMENT TO HAUL YOUR LARD ASS THROUGH THE DOOR FRAME TO THE ER.

So yes, this pisses me off big time. But anyway, on to this weeks show...

The dude stuffs his face with some more processed animal at one place, an then decides to hit this Indian place in town (NYC I think). They have a challenge - he who can eat a bowl of their hottest curry gets a prize. The owner dude (cue Appu accent) takes him into the kitchen, he and the chef (cue SERIOUS Appu accent - I have no idea what the chef said) strap on gas masks - no kidding - and they make the stuff, adding heapfuls of different kinds of peppers, including a bunch of ground white pepper. Now, I HAVE come face to face with this stuff, and it isn't something to be trifled with. The whole pepper is super small and white - the plant obviously didn't waste energy in things like size and pigmentation - and will absolutely knock you off your feet. You just have to touch it and wipe your face accidentally, and you WILL regret it. They simmer the sauce, which has already taken on the look of molten lava, for a while; then almost as an afterthought, they add a few chunks of chicken to it. The gave this Adam dude some Pulao and Naan, and Mango Lassi to quench the fire. Which is really like pissing into an active volcanic cone and hoping to quiet it down.


Adam Richman, the pain has only just started.



Long story short, the guy actually manages to finish the thing in some time, with some pretty women egging him on (why aren't there babes cheering ME on when I'm eating spicy food at a restaurant, I always wonder). He makes the novice mistake of wiping his face with the napkin that he'd wiped his mouth; and his cherubic face instantly turns the color of Oklahoma on election night. I laugh mercilessly, because all I can think of is his insides pleading for the onslaught to stop.

And then something happens which makes me feel even more sorry for this guy. I mean, I generally fell sorry for people who put their bodies through all this crap for money - come on, who really wants to eat 7.5 lb burgers or chicken assholes? It's humiliating. But this dude Adam really got shafted at the end of this episode. Places that have weird eating challenges give you cash ($500, I've seen it in the past), a framed photo on the wall, a T-shirt and cap, something like that if you win the challenge. You know what Adam Richman got for liquifying his entire alimentary canal and waking up to the most painful crap of his life?

A free beer.

Come on, man...

"You know, I used to work for Satyam before this job..."


Update: Check out the comments! Someone ACTUALLY took the challenge and wrote here - woohoo! No cameras, no pretty women, no bullshit. i.e. A true hero (Also recipient of ONE measly Kingfisher, unfortunately...)

One more pathetic Birthday Rhyme

My friend had her birthday the other day, and I ruined it for the poor thing by mailing her this one:

My poem for your birthday
Was going to involve some word play
But after that missive from your grandmum
I realized I got nothing so I'm gonna keep mum.
Looks like your hubby's gonna get some boo-tay.

Her grandma had sent her a card (a real thing, made out of paper, with stuff written on it. Old people can be so cute), which basically urged her to get on with it and have multiple babies. I happened to see the card, and that reminded me of my grandmum, and... More on this mass geriatric hysteria later.

Winter

The antarctic ice-sheet IS warming. Why does the right wing still have a problem with this fact?

You may have already read the article in this week's Nature: The data (don't take my word for it - the views are pretty much unanimous on this) is solid. The antarctic ice sheet has been warming pretty much at the same rate as the rest of the globe in the last 50 years.

So why does the right take such glee is misrepresenting facts? It's easy: if you read drudge, just watch his headlines when there's a heat surge. Silence. I can guarantee it. If there's a winter storm, snow, a cold front, ANYthing that is not a five degree spike in average temps, you'll see it given pride of place on the website. Or you'll get supposedly snarky, but in reality really stupid shit like this (from today):




I also saw Bill O' Reilly today (yes, yes, I do, every once in a while. It gets my blood pumping, so I look at it as therapeutic. Have to be careful to limit myself to 5 minutes though...), and he quoted an NYT article about the Nature paper; He said something like this: "Well, look at their title; it says that a study finds new evidence of warming. But go a few lines down, and they say that weather stations in other locations, including the one at the South Pole, have recorded a cooling trend. Sounds like that's a misleading headline, eh?" And then he gives his trademark patronizing smirk and head shake.

NO YOU ASSHOLE, IT ISN'T A MISLEADING HEADLINE. The FACT is that the overall sheet HAS indeed been warming, and the tmeps from East Antarctic are noisy - NOTHING remotely like a cooling effect, as BillO was insinuating.

I mean, we KNOW BillO is an awesome guy, but this is either incredibly stupid or especially cynical/misleading. And since he apparently not an idiot (jackass: yes, mentally deficient: no), you have to go for the latter option. The same is true for the even bigger jackass, Sean (vomit) Ha... Han... sorry, I just can't bring myself to type his name.

And that then begs the question:

What do these right wing jackasses stand to gain by denying a scientific fact? See, I can understand the whole anti-evolution fight: the more you can invoke god in our creation, the better you can control gullible folk; its a power thing. You can always threaten people to behave because otherwise they'll get fucked in the ass by some dude with a trident, but you can't say "Hey you better do this or evolution will turn you back into a chimp." So that's you they demonize/deny scientific fact that evolution does indeed work. But what the hell do you gain by denying global warming???

Someone, help me out.

Another unfortunate (but tragicomically funny) one-night stand story...

So now that Obama got elected and all that, there have been parties around celebrating this fact. I went to one of these parties with a friend of mine. She had a car and she told me she could drop me back home too, plus she's really an awesome person, so I agreed immediately. So we went to this dude's house and we spent time chatting and drinking. The kinds of things you usually do at happy parties.

After a while I realized it was getting really late, and I was getting more than a little buzzed, so I started looking around for my friend, hoping she was ready to leave too. I couldn't find her when I looked around, so I got a little mad, but hey, what do you do, right? I had to bundle up to leave, so I went down to the basement of this dude's house where I had left my hoodie, and sure enough, I stumble on to this:



You ever played capture the flag?

Yeah, I did. Hey, I HAD to - it was freezing outside. So I retrieved my hoodie and left the place in a pretty inebriated state, got hung up on by several friends who I called drunkenly at 3 am asking if I could crash at their place, and walked up the highway till some cab driver who fortuitiously happened to drive by at that unearthly hour drove me back home...

Movie Review - Waltz with Bashir

Oh dude. DEFINITELY watch.

The movie is about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel; it is well worth reading a little bit about the history of the first Lebanon war before you see the movie, although it is by no means a must.

The movie is basically about an ex-Israeli soldier trying to recall the events of, and his role in the war; he goes and talks to his friends from the past, people who had been participants in various aspects of the war. The whole movie is shot in documentary style, and flits between the interviews/conversations and dramatizations of the events, either perceived or real, leading up to its riveting, DEVASTATING finale.

First: the movie is animated. Its raw, the way they chose to do their animation; which will be apparent right from the very first scene. Second: watch out for the musical score. It is incredibly good. Also, watch out for the macabre comedy during some of the war scenes. The entire movie is in Hebrew, and you have to work with subtitles. It sags just a wee bit in the middle, but all of that is excusable. The unvarnished portrayal of real events in the war and the responses of soldiers to those events, the way you will see in this movie is something that I don't recall having seen in quite a while...

I am not ashamed to say that I cried so hard at the end, I lost one of my contact lenses. This is one hell of a movie. Just don't expect to feel good at the end.

How to make money from your old car - without selling it

So my roommate's car got hit - for the THIRD time in just a bit more than a year - the other day; apparently it was this 18 year old girl, who chose to pay money instead of involving the insurance companies (smart move I think. Or she didn't have insurance...)

Either way, this guy got quotes; fixing the mirror and getting a paint job is going to set the woman back by $1,100 (!!!); of course, this guy is going to fix the mirror himself and pocket the rest. No, no, not because he's a jerk - my room mate is a great dude, but because the car is a bucket of bolts and it isn't worth paying to have one panel all gleaming white when the rest of the car is a weatherbeaten deathtrap. (The weatherbeaten deathtrap also transports me every week to the grocery store and other places, so I really shouldn't dis it. But I have noticed that the traffic does part in front of us on the highway - sort of like the Red Sea in front of Moses - in fear of flying car parts and the ear-splitting roar of our rusty cylinders...)

My point though, is that this seems to me to be a great way of making money off of nice people - park your car inconveniently and hope for it to get side-swiped. Of course, you need to keep a couple things in mind:

1. You can only get away with this shit if the car is in bad shape to start off with.
2. Hope that you get hit by nice people. I must mention here that my room mate has been hit a total of at least seven times (that is immediately visually obvious). But still three out of seven, resulting in $3,400 isn't too bad...

At the Inauguration

That's where we were. (What, you thought I'd miss this one?) We were there at 7ish; this photo was taken around 9, and the crowds kept coming in till 11. We could've gone WAY closer, but the area surrounding the monument is a nice hill, so we had a good spot overall.

Way too tired (or should I say, ahem, bushed - well I think after 8 years, we're all more bushed than we should ever have been). Will try to fill in some details tomorrow.

pushupyogi's drinking chart

After a pretty rough night last night, I decided it was important that I let all of you (and maybe myself too) know that this is what happens when I drink.

f(n) could be anything, really; walking, talking, thinking, impressing women...

Hunting Deer on the Versus channel

I don't know if you've seen this channel called Versus. Its the most wannabe-testostroney channel on the teevee machine. I can bet you a six-pack that any time you stop at Versusland while flipping through channels, you will see one of four things: People fishing, people hunting, people fighting, or things exploding. If you're lucky, some combination of all four. I've noticed my male friends watch this channel - they automatically sit up straighter, puff their chest out and make guttaral noises as they watch some fertilizer factory get burnt to a crisp or some thug beating another to a pulp in a ring. It just happens.

One of the things you can see pretty often on Vs. is dudes dresses in camouflage and orange hats shooting deer. There are a couple things I don't understand. One - if you're wearing the orange thing (which I get - you don't want anyone capping your ass), why even bother with the rest of the camouflage gear? What, you think people/animals will look at you and just see a floating orange cap? Dude, once you have that orange thing on, I'm pretty sure you can get away with wearing your gayest powder blue sweater that you bought from Gap, and you'll be just fine.

Second. You know, if you're going to kill an animal can you please stop talking about how pretty it is? The weirdest thing on the show is hunters gushing about "Wow... what a beautiful 8-pointer", or "Oh God, what an absolutely awesome buck", and then SHOOTING A BULLET INTO THE DAMN ANIMAL. Dude, if it's THAT beautiful, why don't you take a photo or something? See, initially, I thought my take on this was because of my vegetarianism or my upbringing or my pocketbook Buddhist philosophy. But no, even if I was born in a family that hunted to put food on the table, I would still say this shit is stupid. If you want venison for dinner, shoot the damn thing, take it home and eat it; I don't care. You can either sing praises of an animal and keep walking, or shut up and shoot an animal. If you're all so much in awe of the animal, let the damn thing live and take out the ugly ones so that other people can admire the awesome ones, man.

I mean, the way I look at it is this - if you were on an island stuck with two women, one who's ugly and the other who's crazy hot, and you HAD to eat one of them to survive, tell me honestly, which on would you kill? Yeah, I know which one you would. Except if you're a hunter that is; in that case, I bet you'd put your stupid orange hat on, breathlessly sing praises of the hot chick's rack in a hushed voice... and then blow her brains out.

Jackasses.

Awesome.



Not so awesome.

Keith Olbermann's damning summation of 8 years of Bush

Today at about 5:30, it dawned on me that the last working day of the Bush admin had ended. We were done. We were done with this administration. Its over. Sure there will be issues in the future, and not all is going to be rosy for the Obama administration. And yes, there will be a time, should be a time, when we look back at these past eight years and bring all those who broke the law in the Bush admin to justice.

But today, all I felt was a huge wave of relief wash over me. It really was like someone had lifted a weight off my chest. I felt like I could breathe again, just a little...

Hilda Solis (the new Labor Secretary) and H-1b visa rules

Its a big shift, for those of you who may be keeping track of such things: if Rep. Solis has her way, there is going to be a much tighter requirement for employers to vet the local pool of qualified job applicants before looking abroad - Dick Durbin's H-1b reform bill may stand a good chance of quick passage.

This is good for local workers who will now be assured of not losing their jobs to "some IT dude from India" so that the company can get a bigger profit. Who this is NOT good for obviously, are the scores of "some IT dude from India"s, unless of course they are truly the most qualified in the field. Unless they do something about the current H-1b issues though, we'll continue to hear stories of underpaid and abused H-1b workers who are constantly under the fear of having their visa snatched away from them.

Update: Dailykos has an interesting diary on this. Read through the comments section for a fascinating window into the arguments presented back and forth.

Update 2: A video well worth watching that makes you reflect on the situation from a very different perspective...

Israel shells UN HQ in Gaza - ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

This is beyond outrageous. While truce talks have been initiated, you hit THE UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS IN GAZA???

Thousands of TONS of food aid - GONE.
Fuel Supplies - GONE.

There were refugees - REFUGEES - inside the compound - and you shell the place!?!?!?

And what does our mainstream media have to say about this?

CNN



MSNBC and FOXNEWS are marginally better.






ABC



CBS



Pathetic.

The blogosphere is, as usual, ahead. Check out HuffPo. Dkos? No diaries yet?

Remember, you can donate from here. Do it.

Sure sign of the economic downturn - the ING direct lion

I was waiting around at the station yesterday, and I walked up to an INGdirect advertisement on the platform. I noticed something about its logo that I felt obliged to reproduce at high resolution here. Look at the ING lion. No, seriously, take a good look at the face of the poor thing...



If you're a financial company, and the lion in your logo looks like it's just been castrated w/o anesthetic, you KNOW times are bad...

The best Indian song in English. EVER.

Following the happiness I (and apparently a few others) derived from seeing the best Indian movie dialog in English. EVER. , I thought I'd follow it up with this immortal hit from Kannade movie super star Rajkumar. If your ears bleed, you've been warned. Bonus: Try to decipher the English. For every complete line you get right, drink. (you'll stay sober all night.)

Update: For the best buffalaxed song, EVER, you've got to see this. Though i you live in the North East, you've probably seen this video on a weekend morning on your Desi/Indian channel...

(h/t reader JC)



Update 2: There *is* a small issue that I have with Buffalaxed songs - I understand the real words, and that really messes up the bilingual homonymy.

Update 3: The text edit just underlined homonymy. What the... ???? Philistines.

Helicopter drivers???

I don't have a video for this gem.

Our Fearless Commander in Chief, in his last press conference today, repeatedly talked about the "Helicopter Drivers" that evacuated thousands of people after Katrina.

Um, Mr. P? They're called pilots.

You elected this man. Twice. Yes, you.

United States of, uh, Israel? Bush takes orders from Olmert.

So here's what Ehud Olmert (you know, prime minister of Israel) had to say regarding the UN resolution to cease hostilities in Gaza.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."

(emphasis mine)

So, Condoleezza Rice has to do a last-minute volte-face, the US abstains while everyone else votes yes, and Israel and Hamas, both of whom rejected the UN resolution, continue the war. Awesome how the President of the United States takes orders from HQ in Israel. Ally shmally. This sounded like a mob boss ordering a minion around, and then bragging about it. Embarassing.

Whole report is here.

Malbec Jam up for grabs

So you want to look up some awesome vegetarian recipes? Ah,I thought so. Well, here's where you go; and if you come up with a way to use Malbec Jam, you get a free bottle of, uh, Malbec Jam. My entry was: Use as spread on warm toast. I think I'll win. Fingers crossed...