Different ways to spend the time

Pencil Art

Pencils are specifically designed to withstand all the chewing and chomping they are subjected during class hours. But rarely does one come across this kind of this kind of pencil art!! I wonder how many boring classes were wonderfully spent to create these masterpieces...

You can find some more works here .

Card Stacking Maniac

Building a castle with a deck of playing cards is a fun activity to pass the time, especially if you suck at actually playing a game of cards. Stacking cards isn't very easy, but Bryan Berg, who holds the Guiness World Record stacks them up to about twenty five feet.

And yes, he's written a book to teach the card stacking laymen how to stack up their very own skyscrapers.. now you can learn how Bryan built his awe-inspiring card models of a Japanese shrine and the Iowa State Capitol building. You can visit his website here, and if you fancy a bit of card stackin' you can order Bryan's very own cards and his book from his website.

Ingenuous inventors invent interesting stuff in their idle hours. Others can browse through them in their spare time.

There are all kinds of inventions that you find on the web. Some of these are crazy , some really interesting. This one I came across is a design for a new kind of 4 - stroke engine, designed by a Polish inventor Andrew Feliks. It really is worth a look,

www.new4stroke.com

A bit of hate and humor

Vinz, Said and Hubert (La Haine)

La Haine (Hate), a 1995 film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz , is a brilliant piece of work. It shows a different side of Paris and France away from high culture and joie de vivre featured prominently in other French and Hollywood visions of Paris. The Paris here is one of council housing, disgruntled youth rioting and clashing with police, immigrants facing racism. The plot centres on a day in the life of three friends Vinz, Hubert and Said from the Paris suburbs. There has been a riot the previous night one of their friends is critically injured and in hospital. As the three trudge through the day various aspects of their life are revealed thought their conversations and the people they come across. The movie is shot in black and white which adds to all the bleakness and gloom pervading the suburb, especially after the rioting. In some aspects it is reminiscent of City of God (2002) , the Brazilian movie dealing with violence and gun culture in Rio.

Yesterday was the 1st of April and Google came up with its annual April 1st gag, this time in the form of Gmail Paper. I thought it was hilarious (I must confess that I was looking around in my inbox for the Paper button before I realised it).

There have been some famous April Fool gags on TV too through the years. The most famous one arguably was played out by the BBC in 1957. The BBC television programme Panorama ran a hoax story showing Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees. A large number of the viewers contacted the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti. The BBC reportedly told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best". You can find the original broadcast on the BBC website here.

The top 100 April Fool's Hoaxes are listed on the Museum Hoaxes website - http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/index/


There are some rather interesting and geeky little pranks here.

And if you find yourself a little irritated with all the tomfoolery or someone in the office is just pissing you off and you have had enough of it, maybe it is time you consider hiring some professionals to take care of the problem. Permanently!! Here's how you do it.. you go to Hitman

website and order a hit!! A word of advice- I suggest you look at the contract closely before you order their service...
...and I take no responsibility for your money..

Happy hunting.

A post long due..

I happened to come across some amazingly creative photography by Chema Madoz, a Spanish photographer. His works are composed of everyday objects transferred into wonderful and weird pieces of art framed beautifully. The longer you look at them, the more you find yourself appreciating subtleties and shapes in the objects around us in a very different manner
Here's a link to more of his works.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There have been a number of famous travelers who made their way to India on foot, starting from the time of Ashoka, and left an account of their travels and their writings have been an important source of knowledge about the times and life in India at various stages of its history. Fa-Hein, Huen Tsang, Ibn Battuta are some of the famous ones. One intrepid explorer that isn't usually mentioned in the history books is Thomas Coryate.


Tom Coryate is the subject of 'The Long Strider" by Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa. The book itself is mildly interesting, but Coryate is a fascinating character, extremely eccentric to say the least. Born in Odcombe, Somerset in 1577, son of the rector of Odcombe, he attended Winchester, and continued his education at Gloucester Hall (now Exeter College) at the University of Oxford. He undertook a five-month journey across Europe on foot in 1608, and published an account of his travels entitled 'Coryat's Crudities hastily gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France & Italy &c' which presented a vivid picture of life in Europe at that time and brought him some amount of popularity.

In 1612 he set out on an even more daunting journey to visit and record his observations of the great Court of the Mughols in Delhi. Against all odds he managed to reach Delhi on foot from Jerusalem , and traveled through parts of India but sadly succumbed to dysentery in Surat in 1617. He traveled on his own with little or no money. Some of his travel notes were printed in
Samuel Purchas's Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), and his notes on India survive in A Voyage to East India (1655), written by Edward Terry whom he met and traveled with in India.

And with that I sign off this post, like the ad says, Keep Walking!!

A brunch of interesting sites..

Today's post is just a bland list of really interesting websites that I feel are worth a click.

And talking of clicking, did it ever occur to you how things would be if we had no click buttons on our mouses? Would it be better or are we too used to the sound and feel of the mouse click to get rid of the notion of "..just a click away"?

Well, here's a website that attempts to do just that,

www.dontclick.it

Everyday I usually come across atleast one report in the paper which starts off saying, "Researchers in some university have found that...", or " A New study shows that..". Most of these are usually about how some particular foodstuff is either good for the heart or bad, or was thought to be good but turns out to be bad... sometimes it does make you wonder whether these 'studies' are scientific facts or just meaningless statistics. It might be surprising to see how easy it is make believable 'scientific facts', for example 'Bread is Dangerous!!!' is one such cooked up offering on 'new research'...

This next site is www.lowmorale.co.uk , which is in the words of its designer " ...a series of flash animations portraying one man's struggle to cope with soul-sapping, will-to-live draining, life force mugging, morale crushing experiences of work." I think that pretty says what its all about!!

But if you find yourself harboring seriously psychopathic thoughts against your boss, you might want something a little more interactive to let off some steam. Here's what you need - 15 ways to Whack your Boss!!!.
A warning : Contains graphic violence... really, really graphic!!!

Something a little more sedate, but nevertheless graphic in nature, is this website profiling the works of Mark Jenkins, an American artist who creates sculptures and street installations made from clear packing tape!! Some of these are really amazing. He also has something called the Storker Project which is, well, just weird.

This is one of his creations - Embed

Finally, here are a couple of links to flash creations that are really cool:

http://www.clublaugh.com/es-items/712.swf

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/flash/cntower_timelapse.swf


Enjoy.

I Love Dystopian Nightmares!!

Sticking to the nightmare theme,I usually have a nice feeling about movies or books which promise to paint a soul-shattering vision of the world to come, and in their own way provide a word of caution for the present generation Or alternatively, strip the viewer of any shred of faith he might have in humanity.

There has been a great line of such works starting with Orwell's 1984 (some might say starting with the Book of Revelation or H.G Wells War of the Worlds, but I dont mean that sort of vision of the future where there's a show down with god, or aliens, or starship-trooper-devouring- bugs) right down to Bladerunner or The Twelve Monkeys. I find that a dose of dystopian vision once in a while helps develop a healthy attitude towards life, sometimes bordering on paranoid. And it was with unabashed glee that I got to watch two really good, not great, but good, movies, both potraying a hellish future, wildly different in the their vision- one deals with a childless future, the other, a 1973 classic, is about the world reeling under the weight of supporting the dietary needs of a huge population.

In the first, humanity has become sterile. Women can no longer become pregnant. No one knows why or how it has happened, and it's been nearly two decades since the last human child was born!! Thats the premise of the movie Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron's ( Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mama tambien) sci-fi fantasy nightmarish vision of the not so distant future. " No children. No future. No hope" says the tagline, and the visuals in the movie really do provide an atmosphere of a bleak, sterile world (well, if not the world, atleast London and thereabout where the story unfolds). People are in sorrow when the youngest living human being is murdered, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) goes around with the right sort of depressed look, there are cages lining the streets filled with thousands of immigrants, military police walk around in a kind of SS attire keeping guard and protecting the card holding citizens from marauding bands of refugees and subversives and terrorists with bomb plots, and there is Michael Caine as a goofy, pot-growing, drug consuming, good-at-heart ex-hippie. Oh, and to lighten the mood there's some Radiohead in the background (But you would probably notice that Rolling Stones and John Lennon are heard more predominantly on the score).

The second one that I watched to make that thrilling feeling of impending doom, and all pervading pessimism to linger a little bit longer, was the classic dystopian cracker of a movie, Soylent Green. The setting is New York this time around, and a uncharacteristically vulnerable Charlton Heston is the unlucky Detective Robert Thorn on whose mantle falls the responibility of finding out the AWFUL TRUTH about Soylent Green. Over the course of three decades since it was made, some of the movie's ability to shock the viewer with the awful truth has probably worn off ( we are so much more inured to shocking truths), but it doesn't fail to deliver the shivers. Here again I really liked the ssetting of the movie with scenes of overcrowded New York. There people everywhere, sleeping upon staircases, overflowing out of churches offering shelter, every inch of space is valuable, and only the rich get to eat real food. The masses survive on 'nutritious' synthetic 'food', the best being soylent green. The movie is based on the novel by Harry Harrison and it is well worth a watch on the weekend with your girlfriend followed by a delightful dinner.

The movie's famous last line has featured in lots of places, and of course, has featured on the Simpsons as well.

A fake second post

While I push myself to extreme death to write A SECOND POST, here's a video from Tokyo Police Club in the meantime, for their single, The Nature of the Experiment from their debut album A Lesson in Crime. They sound great. No, they have nothing to do with Tokyo or law enforcement.

Tokyo Police Club
Web
Myspace

A note to the reader

I'll be posting here my views, news and opinions about things that take my fancy ( Saying this is pointless I guess. Its a blog. What else does one expect?).

I think this whole blog business is looked upon in certain circles (of which I was/sometimes am a part of) as some sort of intellectual flagellation to satisfy the craving of the ego and consoling your id with thoughts of imminent web2.0 super-stardom (Or is it the other way round?). I dont subscribe to that view. You can see that I have referred to myself - "I" only five times in five sentences, while emphasizing "You" , dear reader, a hell of a lot more. Whatever. I just needed some text to see how the layout of the blog looks. Is it pleasing to the sight? Eye-catching? Is it eye popping? Do the colors match your pants? Would you like some tea to go along with your pants?

The painting you might have noticed is "The Nightmare" by Henry Fuseli (or Fussli) . I think it suits what I'm saying, in a round-a-bout manner probably. One reason is my liking for weird, absurd connections, hidden meanings and such.

In the case of "The Nightmare", the painting shows a sleeping girl whose head and arms are hanging over the edge of the bed. On the girl’s stomach sits an incubus. An incubus is a grotesque- looking male demon, believed to have sexual intercourse with women while they sleep . The word ‘incubus’ comes from the Latin ‘incubo’ meaning ‘nightmare’. In the background is an animal (Can you see it?In the corner..) on which the incubus travels, known as the ‘Nightmare’. The animal, although we cant see all of it, presumably is a horse. It would seem a good play on words that the incubus, a creature which visits women in their sleep, (therefore, presumably at night), would travel on a mare at night time.

But thats not the point. More importantly Fűssli was commissioned to create this piece to illustrate a poem by G.G. Foster, also called The Nightmare. Also Ernest Jones , psychoanalyst, compatriot of Freud, and his biographer used a version of The Nightmare as a frontispiece for his classic work "On the Nightmare", dealing with , not unexpectedly, nightmares.

And it seemed apt to use The Nightmare as frontispiece to kick off a blog which apparently professes to deal with thoughts. Maybe not nightmares, but thanks for reading!

Oh, and yeah I'll be posting some stuff, say, once in a while... until then,
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.