Irrelevance Glorified

This post is about one of my favorite & ridiculous shows on television. Its premise is in many ways a perfect one : to predict the outcome of a battle that can never happen, ensuring that its results can never be proven true or false. Continue Reading »

So, if you know me, you know that I don’t like Tom Brady. In fact, even if you don’t really know me, you might suspect that I hate Tom Brady, considering that I’ve made two posts consisting solely of the fact that I hate Tom Brady, on occasions where he has suffered devastating losses.

So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! Continue Reading »

If you know me, it’s pretty hard to believe that I don’t have some super awesome phone. I mean, I’m a pretty big nerd and I like spending money on electronic gadgets, so it wouldn’t be hard to imagine me with a Crackberry or something. But no, I’ve always made do with something two generations outdated, because I’m pretty low maintenance, I don’t like talking on the phone, and there aren’t a whole lot of people who actually want to talk to me.

Well, no more.

Yesterday, I got my T-Mobile G1, and I’m totally basking in the glow of the future now. Why didn’t I get an iPhone? Well, truth be told, it turns out I’m a Google fanboy and not an Apple fanboy. I’m asssuming that the G1 will be a sort of technological gateway drug for me. I’ll start out with a 3G smartphone, and pretty soon I’ll be signing up for elective bionic implants. I have no doubt that I’ll soon become addicted to having the internet and all the glory (and cat pictures) that it entails at my fingertips, so much so that I’ll get wifi installed in my cerebrum so that I’ll never be too far from the Hive Mind. Where will Ranjeet end, and Mecha-Ranjeet begin? That’s a question we’ll have to leave to the philosophers.

What will this mean for this website? Probably not much, although with constant location information and a 3 MP camera, I’ll be much more likely to explore fearlessly and document diligently. And the internet will never be the same.

How soon is the future? Well, consider this : I’ve been composing this post from my phone. I’ll let you go get a paper towel to wipe off your ears, since I’ve just blown your mind. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here, going through your stuff.

So, like I ranted a few days ago about how horrible Virtuosity was. And I mentioned that Demolition Man was on it’s way, and that I expected it to be horrible and entertaining. Boy, was I right! Now, here is how a horrible movie should be done!

The two movies are quite similar. Amazingly enough, both of their plots can be described as : A future Los Angeles Police Department is faced with a dilemma when a psychopathic killer from the past improbably escapes and gets out on the loose. While the escape seems mysterious and accidental, further detective work reveals a more sinister “inside job”, where a seemingly benevolent person has orchestrated the breakout. This psychotic killer kills people just for fun, and as the death count rises, the police department is forced to turn to the killer’s previous nemesis, a former cop who is now incarcerated. The cop clashes with the current administration, but between him and his female partner, they are finally able to bring the killer to justice. And by justice I mean death.

I guess this is why Netflix suggested both of them at the same time (I assume, since they were next to each other in the queue).

Demolition Man has more explosions, a more imaginative (cliched, but imaginative, if that makes any sense, which is kind of doesn’t) image of the future, and much much better one-liners. Wesley Snipes is a much more amusing villain, and Stallone pulls off the improbable victory over an insurmountable enemy with lots of style. Kudos, Demolition Man! You get four stars from me!

I, in general, possess a lot of empathy. I can look at situations, or issues, and see how other people think and why they support the positions they do. Unlike some of the unwashed masses, I can see why olympic events such as synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics do showcase talent and are worthy of our adulation.

Not so much with synchronized diving.

I’ve been watching the Olympics the last few nights, and really, synchronized diving seems pretty worthless. It seems that you perform exactly the same dives as you would in individual diving….but you just copy someone else as well. There’s really nothing special about it, and frankly I’m just stunned that it’s a medal worthy sport when, say, cricket isn’t.

The only nice thing about synchronized diving that I can think of is that it’s fairly steroid and cheater proof, unless someone out there uses Siamese Twins or something.

First of all, I’m no business man. I’ve got no MBA degree, I’m just a humble engineer. I don’t know how to, say, take risky mortgages and package them all together into an amorphous mass that, while easier to disguise and thus sell, ends up severing the relationship between homeowner and bank. And I probably wouldn’t think of slicing parts of my company out into thousands of pieces, giving those pieces assets, getting banks to give those “special purpose entities” low interest loans based on those assets, and then getting the S.P.E.’s to lend that money to my main corporation to raise money without appearing to be in debt. I’m just not that smart.
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Well, thanks to the strike, I really don’t have much new Daily Show to post. So I’ll just be forced to make stuff up. It has been determined that if I was a superhero, my superpower would be a heightened ability to search for things on the Internet. It’s just how I’ve been blessed. So today….I will talk about the Internet. Have you heard of it?

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Lately, I have found myself fascinated by PostSecret. For those not familiar with the concept, it started as a community art project for Artomatic, a “Multimedia Art Event”. The founder, Frank Warren, asked people to anonymously send in their secrets on postcards. The only rules were the that the secrets needed to be truthful, and they needed to actually be secrets. He has turned this into four books, the last of which just came out. While the books contain many secrets, a small number of new secrets are posted every week on Sunday (but no archive). The secrets themselves range from banal to funny to haunting. Psychologically speaking, I can see how sending an anonymous secret could be liberating, especially some of the darker ones you see.
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Well, another birthday has come and gone. Nothing really exciting happened, which is somewhat disappointing. Every year that goes by, I always hope for some latent superpowers to develop. Some weird crick in my DNA, working on a 28-year time delay. But, try as I might, I could not levitate anything with my mind. Of course, there is the chance that I have developed superpowers already, I just don’t know what they are or how to use them. How do you use a muscle you have never used before? I still have no idea how I figured out to wiggle my ears.

However, I have been impressed with the outpouring of support and adulation that this edition of my birthday has brought forth. There’s pretty much no one I can make feel guilty for forgetting my birthday. Actually, it kind of reminds me of a birthday I had a number of years ago, when Yusuke secretly e-mailed a bunch of people telling them it was my birthday and that they should e-mail me to congratulate me. I was pleasantly surprised by the response, until one guy actually put in his e-mail “Yusuke told me to e-mail you”, which kinda broke the spell. And made me forever mistrustful.

Don’t think I’m not onto you.

Yeah, yeah, the title of this post is just a little bit melodramatic. But there’s a point; I just have to get to it. I’ve always wondered why I (and many other people, for that matter) get so worked about sports. We’ve made up extensive rules about being a fan, we invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in tickets and clothing, travel hundreds of miles to see games, etc. I can totally understand the reason for going to sporting events. You know, watching feats of human endurance, strength, and skill ; Faster, Higher, Stronger and all that jazz. Sports are just as compelling and entertaining as movies. But somewhere along the way, it gets twisted. And for a while, I thought I had it licked. Continue Reading »