When I was stuck in a small town for two years during my pre-college days, I spent a disproportionate amount of time at the District Library. (It was a small town, small enough to walk across in an hour, yet big enough to be a district headquarter). There I chanced upon an almost complete collection of Neville Cardus collections on cricket. That is what probably drives me to read about cricket, after having watched a cricket match.

I am not really a big fan of movie reviews as a lead up to a movie, but I read movie reviews (by writers I enjoy) in the same way that I read write-ups on test matches (by writers I enjoy). I read the review or write-up to talk my self through what I watched.

There is much that has been written about Ebert, now that he is gone, but for me personally, the greatest thing about him has been his blog.

The age of the blog is gone. We all have a life, and are too busy being ‘funny’ on twitter.

Personally, I believe that the last 10 years (since 2003 when I got a job and my first access to an always on internet connection) have been the golden period of personal blogging.

And Ebert is one of the persons who did it so bloody well. He bought a lifetime of professional writing experience, and used it arch out autobiographical notes and social commentary on a blog.

(When I heard that Ebert had died, I immediatley went off looking to see if Fred Pohl was still alive.)

The prodigious lengths of his blog posts was an inspiration. His last post on the ‘leave of presence’, especially now in hindsight, was .. something like what I would love to leave behind.

A couple of days ago, when someone shared the statement from Iain Banks, I told myself that there is still some hope. I told myself, there is Pratchett – still doing two books a year -, King – he fucked up The Dark Tower series, but he did finish it after the accident – and Ebert – still writing and writing lots at that.

Somewhere in the deep past, I encountered a video which had these words:

Butterflies are random thoughts that people have. They live. They die. They are pointless.

I don’t quite know why, but these words burrowed into the depth of my hippocampus. Since then they have proceeded to pop out ever so often, leaving me with that vague feeling that you can only say in French what it is.

I could never quite remember where it was that I had encountered the quote. It was a video, possibly a music video, with some technoish music. If I had to hazard a guess, I might have said that it was from Bleach, principally because it had a ton of butterflies, and also because it had a lot of the kind of music that would work well with a quote like this.

Usually my first instinct when memory sends me something like this is, not surprisingly, to search it out on the web. I must have tried doing it, before without getting anything. But today, I ended up at a blog that gave me the title of the video where I probably encountered the quote, an AMV for Boogiepop Phantom – Butterfly by MindWarp.

Which is a surprise because I don’t remember watching ‘Boogiepop Phantom’, or anything related to it.
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While performing my searches, I ended up at an interesting Pakistani media blog: Cafe Pyala, specifically to an post on an apparently hollow coffee table book manufactured by coke. The post collects the various uplifting notes from the book, which includes this wonderful attempt at motivational slogan: “Caterpillars turn into goo to turn into butterflies”.

From Vinayak Razdan’s most excellent post, I have happened upon a most wonderful webcomic (?) dramatization of the post-1947 history of Kashmir.

Part 1
Part 2
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Edit: April 29th, 2013
Part 3(a?)

I am currently reading Karen Armstrong’s facinating book, A History of God, which covers the development of the conception of God within the three Abrahamic religions, and I am currently at the chapter where she treats the lines of Philosophical enqiry into the nature of divinity till abput the end of the thirteenth century.

Anyway, in the discussion of Thomas Aquinas, she has the following quote from his work, DePotentia:
“Hence in the last resort all that man knows of God is to know that he does not know him, since he knows that what God is surpasses all that we can understand of him.”

I wonder if this makes him an agnostic? Probably not, but having that thought weirded me out.

Starting now at Coursera:
Listening to World Music (Starting today)

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (Starting today)

Internet History, Technology, and Security (Starting today)

Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation (Started 17th)

Learn something new.

This happened when I was in high school. Ours was a fairly new school, and it always seemed as if there was always some construction going on. So, one day I turned up at school and found a couple of workers with sledgehammers breaking up a bit of concrete pavement near the gate.

Despite my lifelong love of an easy life, I have always had this idea that I should pick up a life in manual labour, a possible response to having two teachers for parents. For quite some time during my childhood, my dream of an idea life was to be a truck driver, though in that case it might have been the call of the Dhaba more than the call of the road [Once when I was still in primary school, on a road trip with an uncle, I was allowed to eat at a Dhaba, which had been on my mother ban list as an unhygienic place].

Anyway, I managed to get hold of one of the sledgehammers, and while I didn’t quite smash the school into tiny bits, I had a few moments of tremendous fun swinging the hammer around till some teacher inevitably appeared and chased me away.

An inconsequential event, except that recently while being stuck in an autorickshaw in traffic, I had time to consider the vital question of what I should equip my army with, if I ever raised an army. My deep hands-on expertise with the sledgehammer leads me to believe that it would be an ideal weapon. I would lean towards a 5 Kilo hammer instead of a 10 Kilo, effective without having so much inertia that it keeps flinging you against the enemy.

Once I thought about the sledgehammer I had to consider the battle axe. Battle Axes have a lot going for them (or very little, given that they are the preferred weapon for most Dwarves in Sword and Sorcery works), and multiutility nature of Battle Axes does make them very attractive. One can conceive that someone might use a Battle Axe as a nail cutter or as a can opener, and while the Sledgehammer used as a nail cutter or as a can opener could be a fair ground show, it wouldn’t really be pretty.

However, as long as I am equipping the army, I would stick with the Sledgehammer, primarily because it has more SMASH!

And SMASH! matters. Don’t say it doesn’t. And unless you are Hulk, a Sledgehammer is how you get SMASH!

So, there I decided, Sledgehammer as the primary melee, with probably a small pocket sized Battle Axe as the multipurpose knife thingie. Actually, as long as the Axe is smallish and throwable, you wouldn’t even miss a ranged weapon.

Some site reminded me about Manoj Bajpai by serving an ad for Gangs of Wasseypur.^[1]

Because I am too tired, I will just embed a video of the song “Pehli Nazar Mein Dari Thi”^[2] from the movie Road – an extended study of RGV’s obsession with his heroines and Bajpai’s potrayal of a psychopathic hitchhiker’s obsession with a girl.

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[1]: Gangs of Waseypur is Richa Chadda‘s third movie after having made her debut in 2008 in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. I hope this is because she hasn’t been interested.

[2]: The song goes, “Pehli Nazar Mein Dari Thi, Doosri mein bhi dar gayi rey!” (She was frightened the first time she saw me, the second time around she was still afraid.)

The Fastest Man who ever lived now joins Fire in Babylon in the list of favorite documentaries on Caribbean sports.

The first, as you might guess, is about Bolt, and is a straight story about who and where of Bolt, narrated by Michael Johnson. Despite being a straight tale, it is fun because Bolt is fun all by himself, and there is this huge contrast between Johnson and Bolt, as far as their attitudes go – so it is a bit like having Boycott profiling Sehwag.

The Fire in Babylon is a more ambitious undertaking, which tries to contextualize the rise of the great West Indian bowling arsenal to the social/cultural changes – rise of civil right movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Rastafarian movement, and the music of the Caribbeans. Even if you don’t really agree with the content, it is immensely entertaining, with the music, and the doped out poet philosophers.