Tag Tag

Orey kallile rendu maangaa

Tag, the First

Space Bar asks whoever wants to to take up Swar's tag.

Procedure:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Ergo

1. No Fuss Cooking - 100 recipes you can't go wrong with by Sheema & Jhampan Mookerjee.

This book seriously rocks. Sort of like a hard copy version of Cooking for Engineers. We've mastered the Ratnagiri fish curry, and the jhal sprouts thing. Very easy.

2. Right. Done. Thank god I picked a book that has a 123 pages. [Where have we heard this line before?]

3 & 4.

"Fry over high heat for 5-6 minutes till mutton turns brown. Add ginger and spice powders, and sauté for a minute. Stir in 2 tbsp curd."

In case you're wondering, this is from a rogan josh recipe.

5. Whoever wants to take this up. [Where have we heard this line before?]

Tag, the Second

Emma has got one and names us by name, so how to not respond?

Procedure:

The following is apparently a list of books, "most of them sitting unread in people's bookshelves to make them look smarter". The rules are: bold the ones that you have read, underline the ones you have read in school, italicize the ones you have started but didn't finish.

One doubt. School = high school and earlier, or in the American sense, college? We will assume former.

Our list is going to suck ass. But what the hell.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude (I think!)
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

Also, abridged stuff read in school didn't count.

There's an obscene amount of Jane Austen in the list, also Thomas Hardy, Dumas, no Richard Dawkins/Daniel Dennett. It's a very odd list. Please don't judge me by it.

We pass this on to "Whoever wants to take this up." [Where have we heard this line before?]

This Just In: This is turning out to be one superbly popular pair of tags for some reason. So far, the following unfortunates have succumbed to the charm:

Srinivasan Balasubramaniam Thirugnanasambandamoorthi
Nisha
Kenny has promises to keep, and miles to go before she sleeps
Imam Waspsoro has finished with the saga of Subtle Subramanian and spread the tag

Watch zis ispace.

Mahaquizzer 2008

The 2008 edition of the Karnataka Quiz Association's annual individual written quiz Mahaquizzer will be held this weekend. This is an open quiz.

There are prizes for best overall quizzer, best woman participant, and best student participant. Please carry valid identification if you are competing as a school/college student.

Write to kqaquizzes [AT] gmail [DOT] com or mahaquizzer [AT] gmail [DOT] com to register, mentioning which city you would like to appear from in the subject line.

Date: 18 May, 2008 (Sunday)

Reporting Time: 0930 (Please be in your seats by this time. No one will be allowed in after 0945.)

Venue:
Innobox Systems Pvt Ltd
#G19, Ground Floor,
Swarnajayanthi Complex,
SR Nagar, Hyderabad - 73

Map:



Directions: From Punjagutta, take the road that goes towards Ameerpet. Cross the Fantoosh-greenlands road junction. Keep going on the road till you see HUDA Complex- Maitrivanam on the RIGHT. Swarnajayanti Complex is the complex immediately after the HUDA complex on the RIGHT.

Hyderabad Coordinator: Satyajit Chetri (91-99591-89943)

Help! Classroom Needed!!

The 4^th edition of the Karnataka Quiz Association's annual summer written individual Mahaquizzer quiz is scheduled to be held at 9:30 a.m., on Sunday, 18 May.

The powers that be (1, 2) are finding it hard to get a venue for the Hyderabad edition. Previous versions were held in college classrooms (St. Francis, Begumpet and this other college in Marredpally).

Help is needed.

A classroom (school, college) or other room (preferably with desks) that can seat 50-70 people and is available between 9:00 a.m. and 01:00 p.m. on May 18, 2008 is being sought. If you know someone who can arrange this, please email quizhyd [AT] gmail [DOT] com and mark a copy to choultry [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Or if you know Ludwig, you can call Ludwig.

Please to help.

2 Ways Of Looking At A Cycle With A Basket

Which are random thoughts inspired by morning bike rides

Eos rhododactylos (this be new favourite expression) had barely shrugged off the stifling embrace of a very warm night and started to do her dance in the sky when we dittoed off the dittoed ditto of a very ditto ditto ourselves and careened about the silent (except for 3 million trucks and 17.74 million call center cabs) roads of Hyderabad.

We were on our way to a 5:30 a.m. at rendezvous for a run around/near KBR Park in Banjara Hills. It struck us that

(a) We hadn't showed people the cycle before
(b) We hadn't ever taken the bugger out this far before

Those who know will tell you that the road from Nagarjuna Circle to KBR Parks is a long and relentless climb, with a pause at the mosque near Q Mart where the load revels out a bit and lets you catch your breath. All the months of wondering why the thing had 15 gears came to an end when we hit this stretch. They are necessary, friends, necessary. Age doth wither and custom stales the dainty feet and legs and they need the help of mechanical advantage...

Parked at KBR, drank half of water supply (bad move), duly put one horrendously exhausting wheezifying perambulation of the thing, and then wheeeeee.... Slipped into top gear and screamed down the hill at a terrifying clip.

Now a salient feature of this hill is that while coming down, right near the bottom, there stands a superior eatery that rejoices in the name of Chutney's. Curiously, we'd somehow managed to slip in a Rs. 100 note into the shorts pocket, so we were able to stop off at said establishment and order a steamed dosa parcel thing. This we slipped into basket, and furiously pedaled home because eos rhododactylos had hurried away with alacrity, and was replaced by solaris iwillgiveyousunstrokus which wasn't very pleasant.

dosa was had, coffee was drunk, Sunday papers, etc. etc. A parallel thread of thought was running all this while, prompted partly by an incident a couple of weeks back where a bunch of young boys advised the Nitwit (who owns the same bike) to get rid of the basket, and the carrier and hey presto, "masth poriilu ostaaru anna, impress aitaaru!" (trans: "hot chicks will come and fall for you!").

So what's to be done about the basket? Thesis and antithesis:

I
A grown man cycles by,
Puffing and panting,
With basket attached.
Sissy.

II
Cycle with basket attached.
Steamed dosa. MLA pesarattu.
mmm

mmm...
The possibilities.

So far we're leaning towards letting the basket stay. Apart from this unexpected bonus of being able to carry tiffin home, it helps with groceries, Xeroxing and so on.

Vaahanam:


This was from a few days back, breakfast at chez Ludwig, mit pesarattu, dosa podi, allam pacchadi und filter coffee.

Note (12-May-2008): Certain person has been going around acting all snooty in the comments section that we don't make pesarattu from f'(x) = lim Δx -> 0 [f(x + Δx) - f(x)]/Δx type principles. Let all be notified by these presents that the pesarattu was indeed made via standard operating procedures (soaking overnight, grinding etc.) So was the podi (but by the maternal unit). The coffee is filter coffee (Mr. Bean brand from Tata) percolated by yours truly, with water fetched in earthen pots from the village well by yours truly (yes, it's quite a sight), and the milk was from our own pet bovine Kamu (short for Ms. Kamadhenu Gomaata) freshly extracted that very morning (by yours truly). The ginger pickle is out of a bottle. So there.



Bad pictures courtesy of phone. Camera ist kaput.