Monday, April 26, 2010

Something about this kitty litter smells fishy.



On a serious note: India's tiger population is dwindling. As of Feb 12th, 2008, only 1411 tigers were left in India, according to a CNN IBN (exclusive, no doubt) report. This population figure was corroborated by Stripey the Cub (see picture) in his childish yet poignant blogpost on saveourtigers.com, dated Jan 29th 2010. Then, just last week, I saw an Aircel billboard that punctuated my worst fears...there are only 1411 tigers left in India. It's about time we raise an important question. How that one?

How are there still exactly 1411 tigers left in India? Are these the same 1411 that were around in 2008? If so, what are we feeding them? The saveourtigers campaign has done a fantastic job keeping this number constant. Or has it...?

Digest some math. Your average wild tiger lives on uncooked meat for about 12 years. It is female, 50 percent of the time. From age 2.5, the tigress is highly fertile, making roughly 4 healthy cubs in her lifetime. Assuming a bell curve distribution of ages of the 705.5 female tigers alive as of Feb 2008, we find that approximately 600 fertile females existed, which, by May 2010, would have birthed (2.4/9.5)*600*4 = 606.31 cubs, of which 606 would be healthy. My question is simple. Where are those 606 cubs? Camouflaged? I think not.

I believe it's time Dhoni and the rest of the team at Aircel pool in the money they saved by never having to change their billboards for the last 2 years, and the money they saved by skimping on RnD by rebranding 9-year old GPRS technology as "pocket internet", to find the lost tiger cubs of India.

Friday, February 12, 2010

The Secret is out: Law of attraction sucks giant balls.

Back in the good ol' days, when the only sign of a storm approaching was the aching bones of the aged,

when whatever was two words and brb was none,

when "In the face of increasing emigration from the Eastern Bloc post WWII, Nikita Khrushchev, the then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, booked himself an unenviable place in history, by laying the foundations for the construction of the Berlin Wall" was still the unholiest amalgamation of the words face, book, wall, post,

when respect actually meant something...except when used alone...as a sentence...amongst gangsters,

when E and X were still just alphabets...



there lived an Indian physicist named Isaac Nathan. The year was 1628 AD, and times were tough for Indian physicists. Now, Isaac was neither an engineer nor a doctor, nor a life-sustaining buffalo. So, he was an outcast. Trees provided then, as they do now, much shelter at bargain-basement prices like occasionally being pooped on by a retarded bird.*
A token outcast, Isaac could often be found squandering his limited potential under a tree. This was the case one fateful day, when a fruit lost its tenuous grasp on the tree above, and made fresh acquaintance with Isaac's head.
*do animals feel weird when birds poop on them? I'll ask.

Unfortunately for Isaac,

This was not Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, this was Allapy.

The fruit was not an apple, it was a coconut.

He did not discover gravity and die of excitement. He did not discover gravity, and died of internal hemorrhaging.



And so, Nathan took his secret to the grave, or so it seemed,
until...

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[Read if you are smarter than the average human]

A limerick:

Small baby born with large brain
No gap 'tween a's in his name
In a big country
With no big-nut tree
He stole Isaac's ticket to fame.


[Read if you are duller than the average human, although slightly smarter than the average bear]

This new kid Newton comes along, real smooth like. You shoulda seen this schmuck, wheelin' - dealin' ID stealin'. I mean it was like that scene from Face Off, but with like Victorian gowns 'n' shit. Anyway, word on the street is, this guy commits Grand Theft Idea on home boy's ass, takes this gravity shizz nizz and flips it around faster than mah man Guerro at that new pizza joint down by East 32nd 'n' Bowery, slaps on a copyright, bish boom bang, you got yourself one of 'em Science Oscars...a award that shoulda went to mah home boy.

[And, if you auditioned for Yogi's sidekick and lost to Booboo]



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In all fairness, however, crediting a little known Malayalee physicist with the invention of gravity would be like crediting the fastest sperm with the invention of the human, or Rick Saloman with the invention of the sextape. They all just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and got their heads lodged in some fertile seed. History tells of several allusions to gravity, that predate Nathan's exploits.

1) "If the mountain will not come to Mohammad, then Mohammad will go to the mountain" (circa 2ad) - The force of gravity is equal, opposite and attractive.

2) The reign of terror of pop singer Britney Spears (1589 ad??-present) - a dying star eventually becomes:

a) an imploding white dwarf,
b) an exploding bright flash,
c) improperly exposing, white trash.

Of course, as the blog title is a double word play, I am contractually obligated by Blogspot (yes, they take this very seriously) to at least splash my toes about in the figurative pool of that monumentally successful book/movie, The Secret. Blogspot will be happy to know that I did more than just splash about. I spent 2 potentially productive hours watching The Secret, and all of 2 minutes more reading the back of the book You might say stood by the figurative deep end and did a perfect-10 figurative dive with my Perfect-10*-figurative self.

Below is a detailed testimony of why I then proceeded to unashamedly pee in the figurative pool.

*Based on actual survey. Figures were rated from "I'll pass, you failure-1" to "OMFGWTF!-20".

Dear Miss Bryne,

I have watched and fully understood the gravity of The Secret, shrouded in mystique by shamans and alchemists, honoured with a vow of silence by pure-blooded lineage, carried in whispers from generation to generation, then slapped on a DVD and sold for $19.95. I have concluded that:

1) It is not worth the $20 I did not spend to buy it.
2) I shall never forgive you for what you're video did to my self esteem, and for what it did to the radio star.

Of course, your terribly factual account of the greatest secret known to mankind, also tells us that the law of attraction, the single most powerful force in the known universe, doesn't understand negative words like don't, won't, not, and never, and I'm guessing, as the one who manufactured this BS, you don't either.

You probably read the two points above and are giving yourself a good pat on the ol' back, so let me clarify. Sometimes positive words have less-than-positive outcomes...



The Secret proclaims that you are what you put out into the world. The Secret made R Kelly strap on plastic wings and nearly jump off the 19th floor balcony of his condo in New York. It made a lovable blue furrball that indulged in the odd cookie, believe he had addiction issues. The Secret, therefore, is the single last video I would draw inspiration from, after MTV Roadies, Jackass, and the Ring. At least that last one gives you seven days notice.


Disclaimer: Miss Britney Spears does not partly or wholly endorse the views shared by this blogger. Partly, because I am unsure (and alcohol has made Britney unsure) of her current marital status. Wholly, because I am sure Britney is incapable of reading printed text that is not spelled with a Texan accent.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

SPOTTED DEER, STARED AT. LEAVES BROKEN UNDER WEIGHT OF LONG-STANDING -HUMAN PRESSURE.

Recently I won a staring competition with a deer, which got me thinking about how much free time I have. It also got me thinking about the point, in general, of animals. Thinking about animals made me hungry.

My brain would have none of this thinking business and like that bitch at the party who won't dance with you because it's that time of the month (for the third weekend running), my brain took its periodic time-out. Then, miraculously, or because I was still fully alive, it came back on. It then, flickered off and on a few more times - as many times, curiously enough, as it takes for you to figure out that this paragraph has made absolutely no contribution to the story, and that I have wasted roughly a minute of your time, time that could have been spent feeding hungry mouths in Africa. Time that you will probably have spent finding just the right scent of virtual perfume you'd gift a smelly friend on the Facebook, having a small chuckle after, and updating your status message so everyone from the kid who bullied you in preschool to the "friend" you made on that long bus ride home, knows that about 12 hours ago, for about 3 seconds, you chuckled. This is probably as good a time as any to just skip over to the next para, because (...drum roll...) my brain turned back on.

Truth be told, my issue with uncooked animals began roughly an hour before I even met Bambi. To test my hypothesis, I had asked a fresher at college to come up with 10 reasons why a beer is better than an animal. He showed up later that night with 5 reasons you might expect to find on the tight-fitting tee shirt of a 30-something, Dorito-loving comic book collector, who'd rather spend sleepless nights in front of a SETI screensaver hoping for signs of life from outer space, than hope to get a life for himself, but not in the brain of a fully formed adult human. As is the usual practice in dealing with unfathomable stupidity in the overly sensitive wake of 9/11, I gave him a cookie, a colouring assignment and send him on his way.

That night, I decided to pose the same question to a deer. Unsurprisingly, I got no intelligible response. But to my utter dismay, I soon discovered that deer cannot colour either. I could think of little else to do with the deer. So we stared awkwardly at each other. After all of 20 minutes, it got bored, and left to chew some cud.

Forgive this digression, but some readers wrote in requesting that the second paragraph be incorporated into the story, so that they can stop having recurrent nightmares about starving children in Africa. Yeah, double word play...big whoop. After much thought, I decided on this most plausible turn of events.

All that thinking about animals and flickering of brain let to a mild epiphany, and it wasn't long before God Himself showed up, wearing nothing but a perfectly placid smile, which could make even the most obdurate infant release a gurgling, dribbling, carefree giggle, make incoherent conversation with complete strangers who will make it a point to embarrass him well into adulthood about it, and wet himself senseless thereafter, and a backpack with 20 beers, which usually has the same effect on me.

We discussed at length His criticism of the rampant spread of capitalization in the name of the Lord. He also assured me that where the Pope does his business is his business, although twice last week he was spotted taking "long walks" in the woods. We washed the beers down with 2 glasses of homemade wine, which I quite regret now. God, or G, as he insisted I call Him, then sat down cross-legged, placed his palms on his knees, closed his eyes, and told me to brace myself for what I was about to hear. A minute into his discourse on the true purpose of my existence on earth, however, I excused myself as I needed to pee.

Furious, He began to mumble about how he should have taken the sixth and seventh days off and had a full weekend to visit in-laws and do some gardening. Depending on whether you follow Christianity or psy-trance, production of either humans or hashish will have suffered. I couldn't be bothered either way; I just needed to pee.

At His wit's end, He hurriedly scribbled this into the sand below me - "We - B - Lo ~ G" hoping I would take a hint, and a leak, at that. Instead, I walked 500m back to my hostel toilet. As I took this whiz, I thought about why God came and how little he spoke of animals. I thought about the fresher, his colouring assignment, and whether he had managed to keep his smudges within the lines. I even thought about introducing another para like the second one, right here...just to throw readers off. But I didn't. I knew what I had to do, as if God Himself had said it to me. I had to start a blog.

PS: No animals were harmed during the making of this blog entry. But, the next entry, which actually broaches the pointlessness of animals, does involve harm to random animals, including but not restricted to, one headbutt, one dogpile, and general swearing.