Orkut is a bug

There have been very few acts that I've regretted nearly instantly after being fool enough to commit them. But signing up on orkut- now, there is no doubt about that whatsoever -Maan, I've been a darn fool.

It's not just the "Waant FRIANDSHIP" types that put me off. No, you can find humour in them, if you force yourself to. At least you can squeeze some pity for those miserable worms. It's the way Google, whose employee we have to thank for this wonderful invention, automatically puts anyone you, in a fit of idiocy, accept as 'Friend,' in your G-chat list. G-Mail list. Whatever.

Yes, there is Free Will and all that and I should have said NO to friendship, but one is naive.
Gravely naive. And one makes mistakes huh. Repeatedly. Sigh.

And yes, I know you can block some people, but what the hell. I don't have that kind of time.

And therefore, I wake up each morning to a Google inbox full of trash, invites to the strangest of communities by the strangest of people. Indo-Russian Orthodontist?!!! Now, what would I do in
a community like that. Then, there is that silly You Are Tagged thingie, that is just Phishing - "Say Yes Or Your Friend Is Going To Think You Said No" ??!!!

And finally, there is the persistent G-chatter who will not take the hint if you do not respond to vague salutations from absolute strangers. Being a friend on orkut, they seem to think, entitles them to your heart, soul and sanity. I remember one person even abused me for not responding. Indignation, my friends, does not help in these circumstances.

Well, to give the Devil its due, it's true I have found some school mates and old friends through orkut, or they've found me. But I seem to have found more pests and invited them into my cosy home. Out of the sheer goodness of my heart, I have said yes to many people (who did not seem apparently mollusc like) for fear of wounding their tender stranger-hearts! Bless my foolish virtue, but find me a bottle of e-pest spray and you can even be my friend on Orkut! :)

Dwayne Leverock - All it takes

This man LEVEROCKs or what! Clearly, he gives all he's got and you can see that is a lot! :)
Suddenly, Fat is fashionable.
Also, a milestone for this blog, as it is my first YouTube post!

Sunshine Baby

(Photo via Foxsearchlight)

Little Miss Sunshine

It's the second Oscar movie that I've watched this season and I must say I'm not disappointed, no sir. And though Little Miss Sunshine is in a completely different genre to the more deep Babel, Little Miss Sunshine is also about plumbing the depths, nevertheless rising again.

LMS first knocks the windbags of pretension straight out. And in a comic bout with established notions of winning and losing, guile and sincerity, happiness and depression, what is right and what is not, it floors all its opponents and brings them up again, redefining them...

A dysfunctional family and a dysfunctional Volkswagon bus make a cross country road trip across America so that the baby of the family, young Olive (Abigail Breslin) can take part in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest. Her pushy father, Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) , is a motivational speaker. He would probably be the typical American go-getter except he's such a loser. Olive's mother (Toni Collette) is a hyperventilating smoker who has been in a relationship that's failed and her brother Frank (Steve Carell) is the pre-eminent proust scholar in the United States, gay and has attempted suicide. Olive's step brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is obsessed with hating all, not talking and going to the air force academy. Not the least of this entertaining family is coke-snorting, porn-loving Granpa (Alan Arkin).

And you think things can't get worse? Of course they can. And they do - the metaphorical ride is rough as is the literal -there's death to contend with, hypocrisy, betrayal, bankruptcy and disappointment. But the comic rules.

From cheap porn jokes to more subtle humour, LMS guides you through common perceptions of 'tragedies' into a fresh, clean look at life. In the genre of Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, LMS is a little less simplistic as it packs in a full measure of the foibles of modern day society as a loose veneer that the movie only goes on to rip off.

The champ of this movie is little Olive ( A fine performance for one so young) the real sunshine - her engrossing guilelessness, sincerity and sensitivity childlike and yet so mature, makes you want to think this kid has great potential. It only matters that you enjoy what you do, not winning not losing, the movie seems to say, also through Alan Arkin, surely an understated performance, but deserving an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor? I dunno. And I must admit, despite their obvious disintegration, the Hoover family is rather endearing in the way they stick up for each other.

The movie's strongest message is, however, for the pretenders - people like the beauty contest judge and Richard Hoover who have their inflexible rules on what is right and wrong, what one must do or not. And the message is, quite in the tongue in cheek tenor of the movie - Stuff it!

With a water-tight script, great screenplay ( This Oscar is truly well-deserved) and dialogue, this movie's almost as good as it gets. I have not watched Departed yet, but it will have to try darn hard to convince me that it did not unfairly take away the Oscar from Little Miss Sunshine. Need I say, then, MUST WATCH?!

These are a few of my favourite (forgotten) things...

There are things that you've left behind that you wish you din't...

like summer holidays...

like being treated to icecream on the day the last exam is over...

like borrowing books from Raviraj lending library...

like drawing the kolam early morning...

like listening to Thenkachi Ko.Swaminathan's Indru Oru Thagaval on radio before you went to school...

like travelling by cyclerickshaw...

like riding a cycle with friends...

like playing kho-kho, paandi and that step game...what was it- bank, river, water, sea, play, run...

like complaining about shenaii music that plays on DD when some important personnage has kicked it and the nation is mourning...

like watching national award winning movies on TV at night...

like burying your head in books and surfacing only to eat...

like having holidays on election days, though you have nothing to do...

like not having to worry about tomorrow...

like not having to worry about calories when eating...

like eating hot pooris as soon as you get home from school - with jam!

like playing outside in the evenings...

like celebrating childrens' day and teachers' day...

like getting messy with the 'sweet kozhukkatai' pooram on Vinayaka Chaturthi...

like painstakingly lighting lamps every night in Karthigai...

:)
It's such a pity there's no getting back to all this...

tell me, what do you miss most about your childhood...