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...

The best Indian movie dialog in English. EVER.

I present to you T Rajendar. South Indian actor, director, politician, philosopher, and, as practicing lawyer, also owner of the English language...



And you thought that all that Bollywood could offer you was Indian Thriller?? Ha!!

Movie Review - The Wrestler

Watch.

Unvarnished (and painful to watch) wrestling moves + MILF stripper boobies + a surprisingly poignant performance by Mickey Rourke = An awesome movie.

I knew going in that a movie about a washed up wrestler in the twilight of his career wasn't going to be all daisies and bubbly wine. But Aronofsky (Requiem for a dream) really knows how to spin a pretty emotional tale. Well worth watching, and I think Rourke is going to be taking home some silverware this awards season.

Oh, and Marisa Tomei? Super. Hot.

Donate. Now.

I was just thinking about how I've been flippant and "normal" these past few days. I've been trying hard to do it, to tell you the truth. I've been pushing away thoughts of what has been happening in the middle east, and as much as I've been soaking in from there, I haven't said much here. I don't want to, because there's not much that my ranting will do.

No matter where you stand on this issue, there should be something that stirs inside you when you read this and this. So help out. Donate to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or Mercy Corps. And even if you don't donate now, read about the conflict, and think about it.

Oh, one more thing. Don't bother reading about it in the traditional American media. The reason I gave you the Al-Jazeera link is that they are the only people who have journalists inside Gaza.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING

My roommate just got pulled out of bed (midway through his law school assignment) by his girlfriend, and got dragged to her new swing dance session. Now, I love this woman; she's adorable and all that, but the guy can't dance if his life depended on it (by his own admission), and its 9:30 pm on a cold windy rainy winter day. I just saw them trot out the door - well, she trotted out and he shuffled out into the cold, looking like a broken man in his pajamas and slippers who just wanted to lay in bed and write his law school thesis...

So I feel compelled to sit down and write this post on behalf of all of my fellow brothers who absolutely HATE dancing but still go, because, well, we're awesome (and we're hoping you'll be um, nice afterward). Well, as usual, here it is in list form.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING.

5. Women come in all shapes and sizes. This might look like it's stating the obvious, but nowhere is the difference in height and girth between you and a random woman more apparent than when that random woman is your dancing partner. Its bad enough having to try to twirl our woman around without send her crashing into someone else. But when we're up against a woman who's 6'7" and 320lbs (4'6" and 92lbs is equally bad), it sucks balls. I've had to twirl a really tall woman, and it nearly broke her neck and made me look like a poodle reaching up for a dog treat. I also had a tough time finding another plus-sized lady's hip. She finally had to put my hand in the general area, but I could tell she was all miffed. Too bad, woman. It would've helped if you have ONE concave curve somewhere.

4. Women come in varying skill levels. Its OK if she's worse than us, because then we can do little tricks and make her think she's opposite Fred Astaire. This is good for our ego, which we like. But this doesn't happen often, given that all women seem to have had at least 500 hours of intensive dance training under their belt at birth. So instead we get a woman who's just danced with the instructor and is all pissed off because she's now stuck with the lousy Indian dude who is trying, but still sucks. You know how sometimes you go on a crappy date and you just want it to end asap? Well, that's how these women act. You can tell they would rather swallow rusty nails than dance with you. Well, screw you woman; I wanted to be at home and watch football. And all that dancing with the instructor isn't going to get you shit. He was checking out my ass all this while.

3. Women outnumber men 10 to 1 at these events. Obviously, I thought that swimming in this sea of estrogen would be awesome. And initially, it was fun mingling with multiple women. But very soon it dawned on me that this also meant that I would NEVER get a break from dancing. I would just have finished five minutes of unpleasantness with the girl with unshaved underarms, and there would be ten others staring at me wide-eyed and transmitting massive "pick-me-for-the-next-dance" vibes. So I'd have to go with someone, and then someone else, and then someone else, and half hour later, I'm all worn out and bruised up, and sure enough, there's hairy girl again, looking at me beseechingly...

2. We hate leading. Hate. Hate. Hate leading. Listen, you're the ones all about dancing, why don't you make up some bullshit moves and lead me along? I don't care. You're all about women's lib and equality and all that anyway, so why don't you go ahead and take over the reins on this one? We genuinely won't mind, I can assure you. Instead, we have to think of something smart every seven seconds so that you don't get bored. And all you do is play along and stay mildly amused until we think up of the next trick. Its this neverending battle to come up with neat dance moves (which we men will always lose anyway, since the gay instructor dude will always pull some bullshit trick out of his ass which will make everyone ooh and ahh) that tires me out more than anything else. First, I get dragged out to waste time when I should've been on my couch watching the game, and then I have to bear the responsibility of keeping you (and your stupid dance crazy friends) amused? Go adopt a kitten or something.

1. But the number one reason men hate dancing is: WE JUST DON'T GET THE POINT. Listen. We don't enjoy this shit. Its a big fucking waste of time. We hate the music, because its usually gay shit that they should outlaw outside of old age homes and English-as-a-second-language barbecue parties. We hate the overenthusiastic women who swoon over the instructors. We hate that there's only water and no beer to rehydrate. We hate the excuse of "well, its a good workout!", because we do bench presses, bicep curls and 10k runs if we want to work out, thankyouverymuch. We hate the "you can be close but not too close to the other girls" rules that you make up before dance class. If the woman's hot, I'm copping a feel. But most of all, we hate it because we're wired differently. The only reason we dance is so that we can sleep with one of the dance-crazy-yet-coordination-challenged women who think we're awesome, or, if we're dating a dance-crazy woman, so that we can sleep with her after we get home. For most of us, all the sex we get is purely out of pity, so even though its incredibly demeaning, sort of like throwing us a dog treat, we do it. Because, as much as we hate dancing, we like sex even more.

So ladies, go ahead and abuse us. Insult us, drag us out at unearthly hours, embarrass us in front of gay instructors, critique our technique, make us dance with random women, but please, please, remember why we're doing it. And give us a little pity.

Update on Sanjay Gupta - Stewart and Mandvi

Jon Stewart and Asif Mandvi, who are hilarious as usual.

"Betaa! You let us down!!!"

(h/t reader Aaron)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Medicine Cabinet

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The President's New (REALLY UGLY) ride

Oh jesus. We take the first cool president (OK, second, if you count JFK), and we put him in something that looks like it came out of a very constipated Megatron ass. Bleugh...

Sanjay Gupta as our new Surgeon General???

Really??? An Asian dude as the energy secretary, and now this? What are we going to have next, another Indian dude as IT secretary of the Govt?

I hope they form a Dept of 7-11s, they can get some Korean dude to head it. Another desi dude can do the Dept of Dunkin' Donuts...

xkcd - also genius

You really should go to his website to see some of his stuff - you'll love it.

Colbert On Taints

Oh Good Lord, this is incredibly funny. Colbert gets Alan Colmes to co-host, which is funny enough by itself, but then wait till they start talking about the Burriss appointment. It's a couple minutes in, but worth watching right from the start.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Colbert and Colmes - Roland Burris Appointment

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Ohgr - genius

OK, so this title of this post either:

1. States the obvious, or
2. Makes absolutely NO sense.

If you answered 1., read no further. But for the rest of you, Ohgr is none other than Nivek Ogre, the frontman of Skinny Puppy, who pretty much invented the electronic/industrial sub-genre. In my opinion, the "old" Skinny Puppy made very different music from what they make now, and I like their newer stuff better. Ohgr has made some music on his own - his new album Devils in my details, is on everyone's top 10 for this genre, but a great place to start is his kick-ass album Welt. Its from 2001, and I've been listening to it non-stop.

Oh, one more thing. If you are deeply disturbed by his album cover, there's a good chance you may not *quite* like the music. Just a heads up.



h/t reader Jared.

A refreshing argument re. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

If nothing else, this post on DKos is a breath of fresh air in the middle of the incredibly one-sided treatment of the middle east issue in the traditional media (and sadly, much of the blogosphere as well)

Birthday rhymes with Thermopylae

Something I wrote for a friend of mine recently, plumbing the very lowest depths of poetry...

Happy happy Birthday
is all I wanted to say,
But to make this thing a limerick,
what's the weirdest rhyme I could pick...
Uh, learn about the battle of Thermopylae?


Nothing better than this image to warm your heart on your birthday.

Movie Review - MILK

Watch.

You know what, this movie is good enough that I have to elaborate. For those of who you don't know the story, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in the US - a supervisor in District 5 in San Fransisco. The movie follows 8 years of his life, from when he moves from NYC to SF, until the vote on Prop 6 - basically, anyone who was gay or who even supported equal rights for gays, was liable to be fired from the CA school system.

But what the movie really is about is how a marginalized minority gathered around one person and fought a political battle to gain acceptance from society. Its like a docu-drama that is part history lesson (some real clips from back then), part political statement, with the thread of Milk's own personal story running through the movie.

Powerful performance by Sean Penn, but watch out for brilliant acting by Josh Brolin as supervisor Dan White and James Franco as Milk's first boyfriend. The movie is incredibly well done(the way it is shot, you think you're watching a movie made in the period), with no unnecessary vilifying or deifying of any of the characters. Very very real, and a great window into the gay movement back in the day.

If nothing else, just to educate yourself, you SHOULD see this one.

Update: MissLaura has a much better review of the movie.

Nice New Year Wishes

From reader Sparun, who obviously lives and thinks on a more elevated plane than I do.

> _a new year prayer_
>
> may our each day be wholesome
> and may we enrich lives around us.
>
> may we see things as they are -
> beyond good and bad
> beyond joy and hardship
> beyond our strivings;
> may this perspective
> make us naturally tolerant
> kindhearted as grandmothers
> dignified as kings.
>
> may we strive hard for our goals
> and yet never be disappointed
> at where we currently are -
> for how we get there
> is more important than what we aim for.
>
> may we write others' good deeds in stone
> and their harsh ones in the sand.
> may we nurture a beautiful mind
> and may it give us joy forever.
>
> here's wishing you and your family a beautiful new year.

Lousy Indian lunch at Bethesda - Delhi Dhaba

When a friend of mine excitedly told me about this restaurant called Ali Baba, I was intrigued. The story is Arabian in origin, so I was expecting some Middle Eastern restaurant. So we walked down into Bethesda, and she leads me into this restaurant:



1. It was DELHI DHABA, not Ali Baba. (Dhaba means eatery, and Delhi is the capital of India).
2. The food was pretty lousy. Yellow lentils were flat, the zucchini curry isn't authentic Punjabi cuisine as they claim (and the zucchini was sweet), and the potatoes in the potato curry were chopped once, which resulted in halves as big as my face. They also drizzled some masala on top, which did nothing to the insides.
3. And NO RAITA. ANY self-respecting Indian restaurant has raita.

Epic Fail, Delhi Dhaba. Epic. Fail.

(Best Indian restaurant in Bethesda still is Haandi - Haands down)

One more thing: Reacquaint yourself with Ali Baba's story. I read the story when I was maybe five, and I STILL remember the pictures from the book, especially one tableau depicting the theives in the drums. And Morgiana was stunningly beautiful.

Movie Reviews

OK, so someone told me that writing movie reviews (I see a few) might be fun.

Gran Torino. Watch.

The Spirit. Skip.

What?

Hello 2009

I ate a 40th of a giant pizza. Thank you Matt for providing the hand for scale. You have dainty hands, by the way.



I drank a lot of quality beer, resulting in this look of bemusement/consternation from my host.




I went to another party where I shoved people out of the way to play drums on Rock Band (there *may* be photos coming because I vaguely remember flashes of light)

The inlet pipe to the toilet got blocked, so we went by the timeless edict of "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down" (we provided a bucket, I think). The edict does not cover red chunky vomit unfortunately, but I don't know how we solved that one. Whoever did that and left us (well, Luke and Carlo) to deal with that mess, not cool dude. Not cool. No, NO PHOTOS.

We went on and on till 6 in the morning, wandered off to some bar, and then crashed just as the sun went up.

Oh, and of course, woke up to see Charles Barkley disappoint himself.




It's going to be one of those years...