Typo

When the "L" is removed from "Ali", this restaurant went from the name of a famous character in an Arabian tale to a Bengali exclamation of surprise.

How to make a photographer

1. Convince your subject that he/she needs to purchase a nice camera. Show them your own albums. Point out that sensors improve rapidly, but optics - much slower.
2. Hold their hand through the purchase process. Do not let them succumb to "paralysis by analysis".
3. The new camera has arrived. Yeah! Take them out for a photo-day.
4. Work them through the tech. Modern SLRs have just a few controls that need to be used. Keep them away from things like Scene modes. Emphasize the fact that for amateurs, a photo should be taken at location and taken just right. You should not spend hours processing a RAW image at home.
5. Take pictures yourself. Keep them simple. Ask them to replicate these via THEIR camera. A fruitful afternoon will end with the photography bug firmly planted in the minds of the new enthusiasts. La victorie!

A few vignettes from the American Museum of Natural History

The missus and yours truly happened to be there during our recent trip up to the coast. The big spherical theatre shows a brief "History of the 'Verse" presentation which is narrated by none other than Liam Neeson.

 The spiraling walkway exiting the theatre has a timeline of the Universe presentation along the walls.

 Yeah, hoorah for Multicellular Life Forms. Except for reality TV stars.

 They had it for far longer than we have.

 The lunar surface is modeled on Om Puri's face. Or maybe it is the other way around.

 Sky iron. Bears in the frozen North are known to make their armour from this.

The things we eat

From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

'The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"'

Now as important as eating happens to be, and as much pleasure as it gives us – there is something that cannot be forgotten. Adaptability, and indeed survivability frequently depends on the ability to obtain nourishment from whatever is at hand. This is as true in terms of biochemical pathways as it is in a psychological and social sense. It is as true for individuals as it is for entire societies. Hedonism is not a disgustingly flawed ethical theory – it is the rumblings of some idiot's intestine wrapped up in fancy words.

Having said all of the above, I will now take you through a short tour of things I ate during my recent trip to the East. The first contestant is a 1.5$ slice of pizza from a Bangladeshi's store near the PABT. Eaten standing up against the wall. Random homeless people, confused out-of-towners crowding up behind you. Hot pizza usually goes down without complaint. Being a Deshi store, they should have put some Garam Masala on it.

Moving on. The Shake Shack burger joint near Times Square. Line was about 40 people long when we joined it. For a burger. The thing about burgers is that (with all due apologies to Dean Winchester) – they are not a particularly sophisticated and delectable food. Asking “what is the greatest burger that money can buy” is akin to asking “what is the best Corolla that money can buy”. Of course, you can dress it up – with sesame bread, pickles or nice polished alloy wheels. You can even pile on extras, like well cooked cheese fries, or a completely redundant spoiler. But at the end of the day it is a piece of reconstituted meat. Or a Corolla. Take your pick. 

 

More to follow:

Spotted in town - a 1953 Cadillac Coupe DeVille

Seen in Brooklyn, May 2015. Not a particularly great design year, but you could see the beginnings of what would turn into the be-finned 1959 Coupe DeVille. And that would of course become famous as Immortan Joe's GigaHorse in Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Bengali "Paada" in Brooklyn

When you exit the metro station at Church, the stairs deliver you up into a strange world. People outside are all talking in Bangla - both the East and West versions of it. They are also smoking outdoors, congregated near the leetil "Chai-er dokaan" at the street corner. Yes, there is a wee tea shop at the street corner. Yes, all the "Kakus" of the Paada hang out there, maro-ing adda all evening. This is the tiny Bengali enclave in Brooklyn, NY. It is where my friends live, it is where I have visited too many times to count, it is that tiny fragment of the East Coast where I feel most at home.

Here be spices

 

The Grand Central Market. Home to various expensive stores and some surprisingly affordable ones.Has more confectioneries than Sealdah or Howrah. I think I still prefer Sealdah.

When you have a living room, plus a bonus rant about the demise of wagons

'twas a time when wagons roamed the Earth. Spacious American iron was in every driveway, like the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, which "That 70's Show" very informatively let us know could be used to 'cruise the vistas'. Or the Buick Roadmaster, which our friend, the regular car guy has recently spoken about. Anyway, here is the problem: I rented a Hyundai Sonata and drove it from Newark to Bloomsburg. The Sonata is a perfectly acceptable rental car. Not particularly exciting, but decent ride quality, moderate noise levels, reasonable sounding music system and even with the N/A 2.0 litre engine, enough torque to take the I80 into the Pennsylvania hills without concern. In other words, a perfectly acceptable daily driver, if ever there was one.

And then, of course, I had to move a box. Specifically, a large box, built to hold a futon. And there was no way in heck this would fit inside a Sonata. And that brings me to my question - why have Americans abandoned the practicality of having a liftgate on their vehicles? Is the mental anguish of driving a vehicle you associate with your elderly parents too much to bear? Someone please explain the sad demise of wagons in the US. Sure, you might point out that the wagon has just decided to wear platform shoes and now calls itself the crossover, but a crossover is not really a wagon. A decent wagon is supposed to ride on the same suspension as the sedan - and hence have the same driving dynamics of a sedan. I, for one- do not particularly like the way SUVs drive and especially, behave in turns. And I strongly dislike that carmakers are jacking up their sedans to just create extra ride height and ... nothing else. A proper SUV is supposed to be a ladder-frame truck chassis. Oh, and all crossovers also have a sloping roofline. Why, you fu**faced auto designers, why? When you do provide a liftgate, do you have to render it mostly useless by drooping the roof until all you can squeeze into the back are grocery bags? What if I have a sofa to move? Are you trying to build a Kammback on a bloody grocery-getter?

All my unhappiness would have disappeared if I had access to this (looks like a gorgeous piece of art and can haul stuff. What more can you ask for?):

Anyway, much deep anger aside, I simply solved the problem by picking up a rolled-up mattress which inflates when the plastic sheath is ripped off. This is a perfectly good place to drop down in the living room. When paired with the very bare-bones coffee and end tables that I assembled, the room looks quite acceptable. I believe people with culture would call this minimalistic.

The sublime awesomeness of Mad Max

I have always been aware of the Mel  Gibson Mad Max movies, but I have never seen them. Nevertheless, tiny bits and pieces of trivia keep crossing my sights. For instance, I was aware through, of all things, a letter to the editor of an Indian newspaper, possibly The Statesman, that an Indian association of Mad Max aficionados wanted the national TV channel to show all the films, Bear in mind, that we are talking early nineties India, before the Internet and just barely after the advent of cable TV. So this was a group of fans who got together via snail-mail?? Fanatics indeed!

Then my friends are Cracked.com  pointed out that Lord Humungous from Mad Max 2 seemed to have a startlingly elaborate backstory for a movie character who didn't appear to need one. See, stuff like this - I tend to find interesting. Mostly because cinematic world-building is fascinating stuff. Some of it can be the elaborate, perpetually rain drizzled gloom-verse that Deckerd inhabits in Blade Runner. Sometimes it can be the bright, neon-lit sensory overload that Leeloo and mooltipass call home. And sometimes, it can be the title sequence of Seven. Yes, go look it up. But the thing is, is something like this world -building always intentional or is it just a gofer and an intern gone wild? That is, not part of the script, totally divorced from the main plot? Who knows?

And finally, we get to the car. A Ford XB Falcon Coupe. Aussie cars apparently like having nostrils(such as the Holden Commodore, aka the Pontiac G8). We can get behind that. My other friends at Jalopnik have had a lot to say about the vehicles in the entire Mad Max series. But all of that aside. The reasons you should go see Mad Max Fury Road are many:

• The loving care, and the "throw-the-pills-into-the-slipstream" insanity with which the cars have been built.
• The gleeful CGI-less abandon with which they have been thrown together, blown apart, tossed into the sky and generally mistreated.
• The world building. The detail. The costumes. The set.
• Tom Hardy is adequate. 
• Nicky Hoult is bloody amazing in his hyper-oxygenated vim. At the risk of meme-like repetition, "a lovely day, indeed"
• Theron, C. This immensely talented lady is the furiously beating heart and tortured soul of the film. Her character arc does not evolve, but it doesn't need to. She is the anchor on which this 'verse revolves. She seeks redemption, sublimely unaware that she is redemption herself. She is Mother to all other mothers, guardian and protector to the weak, the naive and the foolish - because even they have a place and deserve to be saved from themselves. 

Old friends, old lab

I found the opportunity to go visit some old friends and co-workers at Rutgers while on my recent trip to the east. Pictures below

We had lunch at this joint called Hoysala, somewhere in Somerset. On my way from Newark, I realized that I had forgotten the following things:

• US1 is an evil roadway which will eat away at the precious minutes of your life without remorse and replace your calm, Zenlike state of mind with something approaching fury.
• New Jersians drive like they live in a crossover universe from World War Z and Mad Max. This is not unlike New Jersey in reality. Please note.
• I haven't seen such a high geographical concentrations of desis in a while. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Then there was some more hanging out with old compadres on Busch campus. Where I found that during my time, I had never seen this statue of Hippocratus

Anyhoo, so we had some coffee,

 And then went to take a look at their double helix structure sculpture which adorns the space outside their new Proteomics building.

 This Proteomics building, also houses the famed Protein DataBank, one of the most important biomedical depositories there exists. These are artist's renderings of some of the early structures solved.

 And finally, I took a look at their magnet room, which now also houses their 800 MHz unit. Very impressive, and extremely pretty - quite a far cry from the dimly lit dungeon which I remember.

And, as I was flying through Midway airport again

So I realized that the best way to test out the new pheun's camera is to go snap pictures of the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber they have hanging from the ceiling. Is a piece of work, it is.

And then there was a BBQ

I never realized that the best part about having a Chromecast is that you can be inexcusably rude to all your friends and acquaintances by bumping their chosen music off the queue and insisting that they all listen to your choice and then drunkenly explaining why. Thank you, Johnny old man.

Superhero time

There is something off with the Marvel Universe. I don't like the idea of superheroes in general - I much prefer the idea that people can work towards attaining abilities (under certain constraints). You know, like the real world. But far, far beyond all of the glam and drama, the thing that superhero movies always get wrong is the terrifying moral certitude. No checks and balances. No equals, no peers. Just judgement. Gawd help us all the day when the Hulk has diarrhoea. The world will end because some super is in a bad mood.

So with that baggage in mind, I went to see the Avengers with half the Biochem department. A nice time was had by all. The entire film, of course was completely superfluous - with the most fucken tenuous of plots. Tony Stark continues to fly around in his WMD of a costume, while ignoring the fact that he can singlehandedly remove the reason for half the world's conflicts at once by agreeing to license his arc-reacter tech. There is some mumbo-jumbo with Loki's sceptre containing an AI- which naturally gets unleashed, since Mister-I-Am-So-Clever-Stark couldn't conceive of the idea of testing the damn AI out with a standalone cluster - no pipes going to the internet. Seriously, Stark, a few nodes in a bombproof vault and ten MIT/Caltech grad students working on it. Would it have hurt to try that? Arsehole.

All the problems in the Marvel-verse are because someone couldn't keep his shit out of other people's business. Also Banner has a boner for Natty Romanov. And she sings him to human-ness when the Hulk needs to stand down. Also she is infertile, and in her own eyes, a monster. There is some strange, borderline Oedipal shite going on here. Anyway, to sum up - meh.

But there was the other highly anticipated movie of the summer - the 7th instalment in the F&F franchise.  I love the unselfconscious happiness of these movies. For all of the pretentious, wannabe Nolanesque, dark and gritty half billion dollar crapfests that Hollywood is churning out - I am glad they still make movies like this one. I can go elsewhere for my navel-gazing indie fix. People have accused the F&F franchise of not having a brain, but nobody - and I mean nobody can accuse it of not having a heart.

Is it weird enough yet?

1. Take  a mini baguette.
2. Slice 2 cm cross sections perpendicular to the principal axis.
3. Sprinkle olive oil on the alfoil (correction: sprinkle canola oil because you are cheap and DGAF).
4. Preheat oven @ 400F (sorry, this shoulda been #1).
5. Slice the first cheese (a Comte Gruyere) into 1cm X 4 cm X 3 mm slices. We need them thin. Layer on bread.
5. Dust on soul seasoning. Yes, I know. Shut up.
6. Swiss chard, that is Laal Shaak - you have this already cooked. Layer a spoonful on the bread. Let the jhol soak in. No worries, this is all good.
7. Now comes the fun part. You have crumbled blue cheese set aside. Place an olive on each bread platform. Sprinkle blue cheese, aah, who am I kidding - put gobs and gobs of blue cheese on. You cannot really go wrong with this.
8. Bake for 10 minutes. Serve hot, eat before it cools.
9. Sides include artichoke hearts, blueberries, grape tomatoes and other strange things. Just be happy that I am not serving them with a side of jalapeno chips.

This stuff is awesome.

A few of those memories from the F&F series

1. That moment when the VTEC kicked in, yo.
2. Danger to manifold. As told by laptop. Laptop is told to "shut up".
3. NOS. Never forget the NOS.
4. Charger with a huge blower sticking out of the bonnet. 900 Detroit horses. (and a chassis made of glued together biscuit crumbs).
5. Wheelies. Oh, Gawd, the wheelies.
6. The 1970 Chevelle running on nitromethane. Again, I cannot overemphasize the chassis made of tissue paper and biscuit crumbs.
7. Pulling a 10 or 20 tonne bank vault along the streets of Rio with two Chargers. Sure, they are police editions, but you might need something with the torque of a M1 Abrams tank for that shite.
8. Letty drives a Jensen Interceptor.
9. Oh, yes they finally got a tank.
10. Runway chase. Took more than 15 minutes. Plane was prevented from taking off because it was anchored to two Alfa Romeo Giuliettas. Which you might know as Dodge Darts.

Who am I kidding, I love these films and I am going to see the 7th installment.

How to tell if you are in a Culture novel

1. Your name has sixteen syllables
2.  Your lifespan is easily 350 standard years (in fact death is more of an inconvenience)
3. You may have changed genders once or twice
4. Recreational drugs are optional. The real hard stuff, well, that your own glands can synthesize
5. You really, really, want something exciting to happen. So you signed up for Contact.

Based on / triggered by this.

Spotted in town - a prancing stallion

This appears to be a Ferrari 599 California. Or maybe it is an F12 Berlinetta. I dunno. Can't tell. Not that I see these cruising past every day. So, just like the exotic that it is, then. But what we can see is that for something from Maranello, the engine is in the wrong place, ahead of the driver's knees.

Here are some pictures, regretfully not turned out too well - blame the old cellpheun.

A tale of two kittehs

A tale of two kittehs: 

Une historie dit en portraits et des legendes.

Dramatis personae:

Kitler: Three years old (methinks). Grey and white. Possessed of a dour demeanour,  almost tending toward grim. Silent to the point of being taciturn. Possibly has some Teutonic influences, this not being far from the German part of Texas and all that.

Chhotku: Seven months old. Black and white. Kitler's offspring, although long since abandoned by her mother. Brought herself up through sheer pluck, a certain amount of good fortune and the kindness of strangers. Voluble to the point of being Gallic. Also skittish.

Narrator: Our saga begins when the narrator (playing the role of designated human servant) comes home from whatever non feline activities occupy his day. He enters his dwelling and makes to take off those ridiculous things that humans wear over their feet (their feet, like the rest of them not having evolved to the perfection that cats have). This he does with scant regard to the kitteh sitting outside waiting, yes waiting in the shade for her afternoon milk. Naturally, such bad behaviour can scarcely be tolerated.

 Human. Pour me a saucer of milk. The good stuff. None of that reduced fat 2% nonsense

But.. what about me? Its been a long day sitting around and napping under the bushes. Me thirsty!
    Mine! MINE!!!!

You do know that you are not getting away with this, right?














Whatevs. Slurp. Slurp. Sluuuurrrrp!

Fine. I just thought you should know that kittehs who don't share go a very bad place. A place where they don't let you sleep in the sun. A place where you could go for years without seeing the outside. I hear it's in the Caribbean. This is all real. A dog told me.