Movie Review: Bloody Sunday (+ 2 great documentaries)

In 1972, a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, ended in a confrontation between some protestors and the British Army paratroopers. (Today, oddly enough, is the 34th anniversary of the incident.) The protesters - mostly Catholics, though led by a Protestant MP - were mostly unarmed and if so, were armed with stones. The British Army Companies stationed in Derry had all the guns, and were frustrated enough with past incidents of violence to use these guns at this mostly peaceful march.

Bloody Sunday is quite well-made. We follow a few lead characters around through a 24-hour period, starting Saturday evening and ending on Sunday at around the same time. The Protestant MP who leads the illegal march superbly portrayed by James Nesbitt (who looks so familiar, but I don't know where I've seen him) as a get-things-done guy who's feeling the pressure come D-Day, but whose idealism is never in question even as we see him smoothtalk his way into defusing any number of volatile situations between protesters and the paratroopers. Lots of hand-held camera work infuses the scenes with a sense of immediacy, and we move through the crowds with the crowds, often with our vision as severely limited due to the throngs around us as any of the protesters.

This is no even-handed movie, though: the bad Englishmen are rotten to the last man, the Irish are quite saintly, even the policeman who snitches on the protesters by revealing their plans to the British Army. Even in the face of open fire, the protesters never fire back at the Army because they simply didn't come to the march armed. None of them. Bit hard to believe, that, especially when the movie itself is openly admitting to some very gory incidents in the past. In the end, when the paratroopers are defending themselves by alleging that they were fired at by the marchers or had nailbombs thrown at them, the movie cuts to a scene where one of the wounded men is taken into Army custody and has nailbombs planted on him. I mean, give us a little credit here.

The movie builds up quite well, though, and there's tension in the air as the march begins and progresses and moves towards its conclusion. We see indiscriminate firing. People cry, there is confusion amidst the marchers, everybody's running around trying to find all the dead, trying to find out who they are. The final count is - wait for it - 13 people.

Feeling a little let down by the numbers? If so, you've hit on the biggest problem with this movie. Widely acknowledged as a classic, hailed as a masterpiece of a documentary, Bloody Sunday simply doesn't pack a punch for the average movie-goer these days. Scratch that and amend it to average person. The incident is apparently still a major sticking point for the people of Northern Ireland; they are still outraged about it, they've had the incident officially investigated twice and are still not satisfied with the results. I can understand that, I really can, especially because the paratroopers who perpetrated the massacre were never reprimanded, and some of them were even decorated by the Queen for their services to the Crown. I can see why it rankles the Irish.

But the British, they've done a lot worse than 13 people, haven't they? I'm from the country of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre - 397 people officially killed, most accounts say over 1000; General Dyer presented with a jewel-studded sword upon his return to England. That's a massacre. How does that old joke go? Definition of a massacre: two Americans, ten Europeans, a hundred Mexicans, a thousand Indians, a million Africans.

But it's not just me and my background. I bet any of you could recite a list of ten deadlier conflics off the top of your head. Inside us all has grown a cynical little heart that refuses to be impressed by paltry numbers. Good for us, I say. No shame in going after the big 'uns, even if it means ignoring the petty thieves.

Now if you're in the mood for a really good documentary, try City of God (Cidade De Deus). It's a Portuguese movie about a kid's life in the slums of Rio. Awesome stuff. And the best part of it is it doesn't try to hit you on the head with its message. There's an insane, unspeakable amount of mindless violence that forms a backdrop to this almost everyday story of one boy who rises out of the slums to fulfil his lifelong passion for photography. It astounded me how detached he was from his surroundings - he accepts it all as a matter of course, there's no question in his mind there's nothing he can do about it so he doesn't waste even thought on it. Even when he unknowingly does something he thinks will put the slum gangs on his case, he freaks out the way you and I would freak out about having misplaced a file or something at the office. It's brilliant.

That's my review then: Bloody Sunday isn't BAD, per se, but ultimately I didn't care about what happened because it wasn't any big deal. There's better documentaries out there, and City of God is a perfect example.

Addendum: I cannot, cannot believe I forgot Z in my list of documentaries worth watching. It's the best one I have ever seen - if you were to watch just one documentary in your life, this should be it. It's about a political killing in Greece, but the movie is in French, because even using the letter 'Z' is banned in Greece (betcha didn't know that) for reasons that are explained in this movie. It's just an astounding piece of work, superbly directed, written and acted. It works immensely well as simply a suspenseful thriller, and to think it's all true blows your mind away. (Unlike Bloody Sunday, this movie is firmly rooted in verifiable fact.) Here's a link to Roger Ebert's review - but, honestly, see this movie for yourselves before you read anything. It's really something.

Tags:

• movies

Word of the Day: Cochineal

Pay attention to this post: you'll be glad you did.

Imagine you've just wandered over to the fridge in search of a snack. You're looking inside, the little fridge light on and the mysterious Refridgerator Fumes wafting out with their peculiar aroma. You spot that bag of chips - nah, that's 10 grams of fat per chip. You'll have that cup of yogurt instead, Dannon Light n' Fit raspberry flavour. Yum.

Not so fast, sweetheart. Did you know your yogurt contains dried insects? Check this out:

Food makers may not want to dwell on it, but the ingredient that gives Dannon Boysenberry yogurt and Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit juice their distinctive colors comes from crushed female cochineal beetles.

... [The] Food and Drug Administration is expected to publish a food-labeling proposal online today that would require companies to disclose when a food contains beetle-derived colorings including vivid-red "carmine" and bright-orange "cochineal" (pronounced coach-in-EEL).

Under current FDA regulations, food labels must identify certain man-made colorings by name, such as FD&C Red No. 40. But for carmine, cochineal and other naturally occurring ingredients, companies can use terms such as "color added" or, oddly, "artificial color."

There is opposition to this labelling thing, of course. Nobody wants to put "insect derivative" in their ingredient list, even if that's what it is. Their reasoning?

"It's not part of the requirement for other animal-derived ingredients. Lard is 'lard.' It doesn't say 'pork' after it. 'Milk' doesn't say 'from cow.' 'Butter' doesn't say 'from cow.'"

Whatever, dude. If "carmine" and "cochineal" is what you're calling beetlejuice these days, fine by me. I can memorise two new words.

Tags:

• weirdness

Tagged or Spammed?

Dude called Matty goes and tags me with some game. Now, this is a completely random dude. Never heard of him. But that would be OK, if only this ridiculous guy didn't call me "baby" in the very first sentence he has ever addressed to me ("You're tagged, baby!!!"). Also note the liberal application of exclamation marks, which is the typed equivalent of the words "you're going to love this", evidence of pompous presumption.

But I'm still willing to give the dude a chance. After all, I've never been tagged by anyone for anything before, poor little me (most of my memes are gathered from LJ Harry Potter communities that I browse often), so I head on over to where this link points. The game: "The tagged victim has to come up with 8 different points about their perfect lover."

Excellent. Electronic equivalent of 'spin-the-bottle'. How delightfully juvenile.

Not to mention, hello, I am married. You already know my idea of my - ah - "perfect lover", don't you? Or was it the juicy, intimate details of my marriage this man wanted?

You know... I just might have played along and told him... if he hadn't spelt my name wrong. No, hang on, never mind. Forget about MY name - I'll settle for him spelling his own name right. Matty, indeed.

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

In case you're wondering, don't - I do know this was some truly random person tagging truly random people in hopes of perhaps getting some attention - and an increased page-hit count for his blog. Just one notch above outright spam, definitely failing the test of "is this cricket?" I just felt like ranting about it because this seems to me to be the beginning of a trend. It's not machine-distributed spam any more that's plaguing my inbox, it's random people in search of attention.

I'm active on a few writing forums and blogs, and I link back to this blog in my signatures in most places. I suppose that's how they find me. Lately, I've been getting emails to the effect of: Dear WtW, I just self-published a book, please buy it, read it and review it on your blog. Uh, no, thanks. You letter speaks volumes about your dramatic flair and imagination.

I think it takes a certain type of person to do this random self-promotion thing. Just the right mixture of dull-o-rama (notice how rarely they have anything interesting to say) and delusions of grandeur (total strangers will love playing spin-the-bottle with me / shelling out 10 bucks to read and review my crappy book).

It strikes me that this is also the personality type of stalkers, including my old-faithful Narayandas Murali Krishna (sorry, sorry, Krsna - notice common theme of name-spelling). Perhaps I have found myself another one in this Matty. If so, sit back and enjoy. I promise to approve all his comments for publication here, it should be good timepass.

Tags:

• weirdness

Bloody Internet Recipes

Recipes for Rumali Roti on the internet are so braindead. In fact, it's just ONE recipe that's been copied over and over on various sites, and here's how it starts:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (atta)
50 g plain flour (maida)

Morons! How the hell am I supposed to measure out 50 g?

Also, since I strongly suspect Netflix is scamming us by deliberately delaying sending DVDs, I'm keeping a daily Netflix log, with screencaps and everything. :)

Posted "Main, Meri Patni Aur Woh" today, which we got on 21 Jan (Sat). We have not yet received "Dinner Rush" though the expected delivery date was 21st.

Tags:

• rants

Joke

"Why don't they have Halloween in India?"

"Because they took away the Gandhi."

.....

Took me five minutes to get it.

Tags:

• weirdness

Wendelin's Golden Globe Awards Awards!

Since I don't intend this to be a sweet post, let's get this out of the way:

Best Dressed - Rachel Weisz



Let's get started then. *Rubs hands in glee*

The award from THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTION OF THE WORD "I" goes to Sandra Oh (Grey's Anatomy), for a speech that began with the greatest consecutive number of "I"s ever spoken in the history of humankind. "I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I-... I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I-.... I- I- I-... I- I- I- I-.... I really don't know what to say!" I- I- I- I-'ll say you don't, girl!



Ladies and gentlemen, the DONATE A BRA TO AN ACTRESS Society's pick for the Golden Globes this year - drum rolls - Drew Barrymore!



Coming up second in the same category was Mariah Carey - notice her right armpit area?



The I LIKE BIG BUTTS SO I PRETEND I HAVE ONE Award goes to... Reese Witherspoon!



The BHIKARI IN A TUX Award goes to... Harrison Ford!



Eh. That's all, really. Not too much to laugh at this year.

I gotta say I'm glad Brokeback Mountain won so many awards. If awards are going to be given out with an agenda, I'm glad it's a worthwhile one this time. :)


The Brokeback Mountain table celebrates

Tags:

• entertainment

I feel like an insect.

Book meme snagged from Fernwithy which makes me feel like an insect that has mountains and mountains of books left to read.....

• Bold the books you have read

• Italicize the books you had read to you as a child or read as a child and cannot remember

• Underline the books you intend to read

• Strike the books you hated so much you couldn't finish them

(Note: Not everything with a strike through it is something I hated, per se. Quite a few are things I just kind of put down and couldn't be bothered to pick back up because I wasn't interested enough.)


1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials Trilogy, Philip Pullman (I only read ONE, the first one)
4. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. 1984, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Sorcerers Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert (finished it, but it SUCH A PAIN)
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd,Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck (Hated this too)
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (really like it, just no energy to pick it up again.)
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (wasn't that bad, either)
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (GOD, it was slow!)
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Susskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (DOUBLE YUCK)
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo (Awful. Movie's great, but book's awful.)
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnights Children, Salman Rushdie (hated it when I read it but thinking back on it, it's not so bad.)
101. Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
102. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
103. The Beach, Alex Garland
104. Dracula, Bram Stoker
105. Point Blanc, Anthony Horowitz
106. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
107. Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz
108. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
109. The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
110. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
111. Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
112. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 1/2, Sue Townsend
113. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
114. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
115. The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
116. The Dare Game, Jacqueline Wilson
117. Bad Girls, Jacqueline Wilson
118. The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
119. Shogun, James Clavell
120. The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
121. Lola Rose, Jacqueline Wilson
122. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
123. The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
124. House Of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
125. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
126. Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
127. Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
128. The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
129. Possession, A. S. Byatt
130. The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
131. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
132. Danny The Champion Of The World, Roald Dahl
133. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
134. George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
135. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
136. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
137. Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
138. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
139. Girls In Tears, Jacqueline Wilson
140. Sleepovers, Jacqueline Wilson
141. All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
142. Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
143. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
144. It, Stephen King
145. James And The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
146. The Green Mile, Stephen King
147. Papillon, Henri Charriere
148. Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
149. Master And Commander, Patrick Obrian (This is a big commitment... "Master and Commander" is the first of a 21-part series by Patrick O'Brien. "The Far Side of the World" is a separate book by itself in this series.)
150. Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
151. Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
152. Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
153. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
154. Atonement, Ian McEwan
155. Secrets, Jacqueline Wilson
156. The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
157. One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, Ken Kesey
158. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
159. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
160. Cross Stitch (aka Outlander in the U.S.), Diana Gabaldon
161. Moby Dick, Herman Melville (And I skipped large parts while reading it, so it doesn't really count.)
162. River God, Wilbur Smith
163. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
164. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
165. The World According To Garp, John Irving
166. Lorna Doone, R. D. Blackmore
167. Girls Out Late, Jacqueline Wilson
168. The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye
169. The Witches, Roald Dahl
170. Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
171. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
172. They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
173. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
174. The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
175. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
176. Dustbin Baby, Jacqueline Wilson
177. Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
178. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
179. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach (and I would like to register my displeasure at being made to read it!)
180. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
181. The Suitcase Kid, Jacqueline Wilson
182. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
183. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
184. Silas Marner, George Eliot
185. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
186. The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Gross-Smith
187. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
188. Goosebumps, R. L. Stine
189. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
190. Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
191. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
192. Man And Boy, Tony Parsons
193. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
194. The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells
195. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
196. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
197. Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
198. The Once And Future King, T. H. White
199. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
200. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews
201. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
202. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
203. The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan
204. The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan
205. Fires of Heaven, Robert Jordan
206. Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan
207. A Crown of Swords, Robert Jordan
208. Winters Heart, Robert Jordan
209. Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan
210. A Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan
211. As Nature Made Him, John Colapinto
212. Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
213. The Married Man, Edmund White
214. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
215. The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
216. Cry to Heaven, Anne Rice
217. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell
218. Equus, Peter Shaffer (see 1984, Dune)
219. The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten
220. Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
221. Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
222. The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
223. Anthem, Ayn Rand
224. The Bridge To Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
225. Tartuffe, Moliere
226. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
227. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
228. The Trial, Franz Kafka
229. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
230. Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles
231. Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther
232. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
233. Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
234. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
235. A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
236. ALIVE!, Piers Paul Read
237. Grapefruit, Yoko Ono
238. Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde
239. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
240. Chronicles of Thomas Convenant, Unbeliever, Stephen Donaldson
241. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
242. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
243. Summerland, Michael Chabon
244. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
245. Candide, Voltaire
246. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl
247. Ringworld, Larry Niven
248. The King Must Die, Mary Renault
249. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
250. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
251. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
252. The House Of The Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
253. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
254. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
255. The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson
256. Chocolate Fever, Robert Kimmel Smith
265. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
267. Where The Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
268. Griffin & Sabine, Nick Bantock
269. Witch of Blackbird Pond, Joyce Friedland
270. Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien
271. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
272. The Cay, Theodore Taylor
273. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
274. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
275. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
276. The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan
277. The Bone Setter's Daughter, Amy Tan
278. Relic, Duglas Preston & Lincolon Child
279. Wicked, Gregory Maguire
280. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
281. Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
282. The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum
283. Haunted, Judith St. George
284. Singularity, William Sleator
285. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
286. Different Seasons, Stephen King
287. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
288. About a Boy, Nick Hornby
289. The Bookmans Wake, John Dunning
290. The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns
291. Illusions, Richard Bach
292. Magic's Pawn, Mercedes Lackey
293. Magic's Promise, Mercedes Lackey
294. Magic's Price, Mercedes Lackey
295. The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav
296. Spirits of Flux and Anchor, Jack L. Chalker
297. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
298. The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Brenda Love
299. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
300. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
301. The Cider House Rules, John Irving
302. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
303. Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
304. The Lion's Game, Nelson Demille
305. The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars, Stephen Brust
306. Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
307. Foucaults Pendulum, Umberto Eco
308. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
309. Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk
310. Camber of Culdi, Kathryn Kurtz
311. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
312. War and Rememberance, Herman Wouk
313. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
314. The Giver, Lois Lowry
315. The Telling, Ursula Le Guin
316. Xenogenesis (or Liliths Brood), Octavia Butler
317. A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
318. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
319. The Aeneid, Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil)
320. Hanta Yo, Ruth Beebe Hill
321. The Princess Bride, S. Morganstern (or William Goldman)
322. Beowulf, Anonymous
323. The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell
324. Deerskin, Robin McKinley
325. Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey
326. Passage, Connie Willis
327. Otherland, Tad Williams
328. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
329. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry
330. Beloved, Toni Morrison
331. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore
332. The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I mean Noel, Ellen Raskin
333. Summer Sisters, Judy Blume
334. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
335. The Island on Bird Street, URI Orlev
336. Midnight in the Dollhouse, Marjorie Filley Stover
337. The Miracle Worker, William Gibson
338. The Genesis Code, John Case
339. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
340. Paradise Lost, John Milton
341. Phantom, Susan Kay
342. The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, Anne Rice
343. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman
344: The Dresden Files: Grave Peril, Jim Butcher
345: Tokyo Suckerpunch, Issac Adamson
346: The Winter of Magics Return, Pamela Service
347: The Oddkins, Dean R. Koontz
348. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
349. The Last Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
350. At Swim, Two Boys, Jaime ONeill
351. Othello, by William Shakespeare
352. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
353. The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
354. Sati, Christopher Pike (I'm surprised this book is here! It's really quite good, considering it was written for teenagers by a writer of teen splatter-horror books.)
355. The Inferno, Dante
356. The Apology, Plato
357. The Small Rain, Madeline L'Engle
358. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Richard E Cytowick
359. 5 Novels, Daniel Pinkwater
360. The Sevenwaters Trilogy, Juliet Marillier
361. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
362. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
363. Our Town, Thorton Wilder
364. Green Grass Running Water, Thomas King
335. The Interpreter, Suzanne Glass
336. The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
337. The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
338. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
339. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
340. The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux (What suckiness!)
341. Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg
342. The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
343. Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
344. Angels and Demons, Dan Brown (Didn't hate it, it was just boring).
345. Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo
346. Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer
347. Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
348. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
349. The Lunatic at Large by J. Storer Clouston
350. Time for Bed by David Baddiel
351. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
352. Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre
353. The Bloody Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley
354. Sewer, Gas, and Eletric by Matt Ruff
355. Jhereg by Steven Brust
356. So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane
357. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
358. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
359. Road-side Dog, Czeslaw Milosz
360. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
361. Neuromancer, William Gibson
362. The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
363. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr
364. The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
365. The Gunslinger, Stephen King
366. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
367. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke (May I say: YUCK)
368. Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman (SHIT this guy stole the title of my first NaNo novel!!!)
369. Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
370. The God Boy, Ian Cross
371. The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Laurie R. King
372. Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Jansson
373. Misery, Stephen King (Scariest. Book. Ever.)
374. Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
375. Hood, Emma Donoghue
376. The Land of Spices, Kate O'Brien
377. The Diary of Anne Frank
378. Regeneration, Pat Barker
379. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
380. Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
381. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
382. The View from Saturday, E.L. Konigsburg
383. Dealing with Dragons, Patricia Wrede
384. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss
385. A Severed Wasp - Madeleine L'Eengle
386. Here Be Dragons - Sharon Kay Penman
387. The Mabinogion (Ancient Welsh Tales) - translated by Lady Charlotte E. Guest
388. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
389. Desire of the Everlasting Hills - Thomas Cahill
390. The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris
391. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
392. I Know This Much Is True, Wally Lamb
393. Choke, Chuck Palahniuk
394. Ender's Shadow, Orson Scott Card
395. The Memory of Earth, Orson Scott Card
396. The Iron Tower, Dennis L. McKiernen
397. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
398. A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L'Engle
399. Lords of Discipline, Pat Conroy
400. Hyperion, Dan Simmons
401. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor
402. The Bridge, Iain Banks
403. How to Be Good, Nick Hornby
404. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
405. A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton
406. Eragon, Christopher Paolini
407. A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket
408. Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk
409. Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho
410. White Oleander, Janet Fitch
411. The Land of Laughs, Jonathan Carroll
412. Forrest Gump
413. Roots, Alex Haley
414. Kleopatra, Karen Essex
415. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
416. The Psycho-Ex Game, Merrill Markoe, Andy Prieboy
417. Digital Fortress, Dan Brown
418. Deception Point, Dan Brown
419. Bookends, Jane Green
420. Little Men, Louisa May Alcott
421. Vectors, Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell
422. Redwall, Brian Jacques
423. Millennium, Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto
424. Disgrace, J.M.Coetzee
425. Shardik, Richard Adams
426. Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
427. Z - A Love Story, Vigdis Grimsdottir
428. Diary, Chuck Palahniuk
429. Don Quixote I, Cervantes
430. Season in hell, Arthur Rimbaud
431. Collected poems, Anna Akhmatova
432. Breath, eyes, memory, Edwidge Danticat
433. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
434. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, José Saramago
435. Not Before Sundown (or Troll - A Love Story), Johanna Sinisalo
436. Hannibal, Thomas Harris (Triple YUCK, and not because it was gross)
437. The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Michael Swanwick
438. A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
439. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde
440. The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking
441. Complicity, Iain Banks
442. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
443. The Bane Of The Black Sword, Micheal Moorcock
444. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
445. Delta Of Venus, Anais Nin
446. Lost souls, Poppy Z Brite
447. Belle de jour diary of a london call girl
448. Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
449. City, Alessandro Baricco
450. Hippopotamus, Stephen Fry
451. Thank you, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
452. Tout à l'Ego (Everything for Ego), Tonino Benacquista
453. Betty Blue, Philippe Djian
454. Naive.Super, Erlend Loe
455. Everything is Illuminates, Jonathan Safran Foer
456. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
457. Krabat, Otfried Preußler
458. Lieutenant Hornblower, C. S. Forester
459. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
460. Drawing Blood, Poppy Z. Brite
461. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
462. The Bounty, Caroline Alexander
463. The Matarese Circle, by Robert Ludlum
464. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
465. Searching for Dragons, Patricia C Wrede
466. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, Douglas Adams
467. The Flanders Panel Arturo Pérez-Reverte
468. This Alien Shore, C. S. Friedman
469. Beauty , Robin McKinley
470. The Eight, Katherine Neville
471. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
472. In this House of Brede, Rumer Godden
473. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
474. Reginald, H.H. Munro (Saki)
475. Queen Lucia, E.F. Benson
476. A Shadow On The Glass, Ian Irvine
477. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
478. Obernewtyn, Isobelle Carmody
479. The Ancient Future, Traci Harding
480. The Surgeon, Tess Gerritse
481. Blindness, Jose Saramago
482. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
483. Portrait in Sepia, Isabelle Allende
484. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
485. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
486. A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
487. Sammy's Hill, Kristin Gore
488. The Ordinary Princess, M.M. Kaye
489. To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
490. Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, Judith Martin
491. Mythology, Edith Hamilton
492. Danse Macabre, Stephen King


Can I tag people? Can I tag - everyone who reads this? I'm really interested. Put this on your blog, and let me know you did it by commenting here. It will be nice to know if other people are just as badly-read as I am... :S

Tags:

• books

Say What?

From McTabby's bumper issue of Summary Executions come these gems of teenagers attempting to summarise their heartbreaking works of staggering genius... or perhaps their Harry Potter fanfiction. Many of these have become fandom classics: Señor Draco is on everyone's lips, as is the appeal to "please spear me".

Enjoy!

Pardon?

• This is a fanfic between Snape’s lust for his android. Snape is age 49 and this android is male shaped and atomically correct.

• A human can swallow a pint of blood before they get sick, a little more than that if you drink it enough.I am Draco's undying sense of realism, but no one cares.

Stories Worth Reading:

• A story of pain and sorrow, not intented for comfort or laughter...a story that remains untold, on of abuse and blood...telling of a shattered girl who learned to twist a heart of stone into one of warm gold. This is not a story for the faint of heart, nor the happy in spirit. But for those who are able to understand what it means to be hurt...to watch as a girl's spirit is shattered like glass upon concrete. Watch as she melts the young master's heart of ice, and watch as she helps him heal. She has no name, but his...is Señor Draco.

• He stood in a illusion...a masacre. Breath poured down his stiff back and tickled every inch of his decaying skin. The Earth seemed to steadily crumble and fall to bits. The grey clouds in the dimly lit sky were flashing with herds of lightning and anger. Cold and completely restless, he stood stubbornly anyway. The air held a slight fragrance of abhorrence and it tightly held him with its invisible claws. His eyesight was going in and out of proportion anonymously and everything was distorted for the exception of a dark figure standing inapprehensive to the power tugging wind. All he could breathe was intoxication and pollution. The Darkness screwed on an evil smile and the last he heard was the final screams that tore through the deathly darkness. Right when everything started to fall apart, he blacked out causing the unforseen to divulge itself. The blazing rays of the sun shattered throughtout the atmosphere... He was forgotten.

Teh Innuendo!

• Hermione wants Draco badly, she's desperate and kisses him. Draco's frightened and turns gay just for the cause.

• "People never handle things, Hermione," Remus told her. "They just harbor them until their docks are full." He paused, noting the soggy texture of the balustrade's wood beneath his fingers. "And some people have very large docks."

Right to the Point:

• I suck a summaries so spear me.

• Have u ever wondered what being a muggle was like?????

Tags:

• HP

Play Fair

Rooting for the underdog has gone too far when you start bashing the top dogs for being top dogs. Americans, in particular, have sold their souls to the credo of "if you're better, you suck". Nor is the wording of this credo in any way accidental: the connotations of immaturity and school-ground bullying that go with those words hold for the credo also.

Take, for example, Americans' attitude towards knowledge. Nerds are a laughingstock. Experts are people who have obviously lost touch with reality because they're high up in an ivory tower and can't possibly know what real life is like. If you have a PhD, you don't know anything about life or morality. So when times comes to decide whether stem-cell research is a viable avenue for scientific community to explore, in come the uneducated throngs, firing on all six cylinders and insisting that the experts know nothing, that the mob, through virtue of its ignorance, is best equipped to settle the morality of the situation - and presumably, channel the voice of its equally rednecked God in this matter.

There are other little injustices too. Take for instance the New York Times bestseller list. Because of J K Rowling's phenomenal success, NYT created not only a separate Children's Books section to house her place on the bestseller list, but also a "Children's Chapter Book" and a "Children's Series Book" section under it, so she could be relegated to the very bottom of the every page, and not be allowed to hog more than one place on the bestseller list.

Adult fiction lists come with no such constraints. There is only a "hardcover" list and a "paperback" list - no separate section for books that are part of a series (Sue Grafton comes to mind). Adult nonfiction, too, has no subdivisions - you would think that if anything, this section would lend itself to subdivisions! But there is no separate bestseller list for "self-help books" or "how-to books" or "relationship books" or "Dr. Phil books". It seems that the dungeoun sentence - the penalty of having to live out the rest of your natural life lurking in the bottom-of-the-page, one-spot-for-your-whole-series dungeon - is only meted out to writers who sell enough books to stay bestsellers for years and years.

Boy, do they suck!

And if you think this policy isn't hurting anybody, think about this: what about the second-bestselling series - and the third and the fourth - that still outsells every title in the "Children's Chapter Book"? If you think this policy is fair because it brings obscure books to people's notice, think about what the NYT bestseller list is for. Is it supposed to be reworked and presented to furthur an agenda, or is it supposed to report facts? And if they so badly want to subdivide the children's books into categories, why not also publish a master list of the top ten bestsellers and then do the whole subdivision thing? Report the facts and furthur your agenda... why not?

But this is America, and in America, JKR is too rich and too successful to merit considerations of fair play.

This post was typed on a DVORAK keyboard, and took bloody hours to finish. But I vow to persevere till I reach my normal word speed, so help me god.

Tags:

• rants

On Tipping

Ever since Chewie linked to the Numa Numa article on Waiter Rant I've been reading my way through the archives of the blog, and have become something of a fan. This guy is witty, eloquent and can out-sarc the sarciest among us. I was reading his rants about tipping just today, though, and it got me thinking about tipping in USA, and what a con job it is.

This is the way it works. Tipping over here in completely optional, but convention dictates that you leave a 15% tip for 'normal' service. Bad service means 10%, good is 20% and if you're feeling really generous, you tip 25%. Waiters (and by this word I mean 'waitpersons', because I'm not going to say watierslashwaitress every time I want to talk about these people) get paid something like $3 per hour, and for the rest of their wages they have to depend upon tips. In comparison, minimum wage for untipped jobs is $5.15 an hour.

Can you count the number of things that are wrong with this system?

We tip waiters depending on the service we get - but that may or may not be something they are responsible for. Your food may be cooked wrong, or might take too long to prepare - that's the cook's fault. Your plates may not be cleared away quickly after you have eaten - that's the bus person's fault. Maybe the hostess was rude to you when you came in. But since we can't refuse to pay for the food, the only avenue we as customers have for voicing our dissatisfaction is through the tip - which penalises mostly the waiter. (Waiters tip a percentage of their earnings to buspersons and hostesses.)

Then there's the con job that the waiters and the food industry are perpetrating on us by telling us that the convention is to tip in percentages of the bill. There is just no logic that justifies this practice. The percentage system works well enough when you order normal-priced food in restaurants - the tip is automatically higher depending on the "class" of the restaurant because the "classier" ones will overcharge you for the food in proportion to their "classiness". But what if you order one of those crazily priced items - like wine, for example? Most classy restaurants have wines in the range of $30-$40 per bottle to $800-$1000 per bottle. So if I eat $100 worth of food and order a $1000 wine, I have to leave a tip bigger than what my overpriced food cost? And for what? It's not like the waiter worked harder to pour me my $1000 glass of wine than he would for a $30 glass! And yet you find supercilious waiters, like the guy who writes the Waiter Rant blog, who would consider you an insect for leaving a perfectly reasonable $30-40 tip on that bill. Their logic is - if you can afford to blow 1000 bucks on wine, you can afford to tip us $200 - but that's just greed masquerading as righteous claim on another person's wealth.

Part of the con is the myth of how difficult it is to be a waiter. Now, sommeliers are a different breed, I acknowledge that; they really need to know their snobbish wine stuff. I'll also acknowledge that yes, it gets very rushed sometimes, and yes, it's pretty hard to keep all the customers' orders sorted out in your head, and yes, the platters of food that must be carried just so tend to get heavy enough to strain anyone's wrist. But really, a waiter's job is just manual labour with more opportunities for sneering. So consider this quote from this NYT article:

"I'd say waiting tables is one of the most stressful jobs you can have, short of being a firefighter or an inner-city police officer," said Bruce Griffin Henderson.

Oh I'll say, Mr. Bruce Griffin Henderson. Mr. Bruce Griffin Henderson must be some sort of stoned-out hippie musician if he thinks a waiter has it bad. Oh wait, he is.

In addition to the con job is the threat: watch us mess with you, your table and your food if you don't tip us well. Waiter Rant-er himself says this many times: I don't know why you would be rude to someone who's going to handle your food, for heaven's sake! He tells tales of how he refuses bad tippers good tables and reservations at popular times... we can only conjecture as to the untold tales of ways in which he messes with customers' food out of spite. This makes tipping look even worse: it's nothing more and nothing less than protection money. And damn, we ought to know better than to support such a racket.

So what's my solution? Impose a mandatory 10% - or 15% - service charge on all bills, like they do in every other country in the world. If the service sucks, we'll have it out with the restaurant, and refuse to pay the service charge (I've done this in Singapore). Waiters are happy - they can no longer be undertipped. Customers are happy - at least the non-cheapo ones are. There should be one exception to the 15% service charge, though, and that would be for items whose price differs by an order of magnitude from the rest of the menu items. When customers order these, they may choose to tip or not... I'm sure the markup on that wine will more than cover any hurt waiter's feelings. Point is, let the restaurant manage the whole let's-feed-the-waiter business. That should never have fallen into the customer's realm.

Of course, this scenario is the stuff of dreams and fantasies. In the meantime, I sleep peacefully at night knowing that I, at least, am not a sucker enough to order the $800 wine, ever.

Tags:

• rants

Oprah, you been pwn3d!

So this guy, James Frey, writes a book called "A Million Little Pieces", calls it nonfiction, honest and utterly true:

"I was a bad guy. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways."

Oprah Winfrew picks it for her book club and heaps effusive praise on it. The book sells 3.5 million copies. Writer makes many millions of dollars.

And then it turns out the guy was lying all along.

I think the only way to right the wrong is for everyone to return this book and demand a refund. And bookstores and get their costs back by suing this man.

What a cheapo.

Tags:

• entertainment
• rants

Various Things

-Wrote ten pages today. Yay, and I'm going to say that again - YAY. It's more than I have written on any single day since November, and even last Nov there were days I did less than this. Shall this be the new year's resolution? I think so, yes.

---

- Saurabh's blogging seems to have picked up. I can't say this for most of his posts, but today's entry has something to it:

... [H]ave you seen Amitabh movies recently? He is so full of himself!

Amen. Nimbu's effervesence on the subject leaves me utterly puzzled. All I do these days when I watch the New & Improved Amitabh Bachchhan TM is think, WTF?! Who does this fellow think he's fooling?

---

- Don't laugh, but I wrote a little poem for Snape. It's his birthday today, OK? It's a good excuse! It is!

A Poem for Snape on his Birthday

O Severus, Underdog of Darkness
and Outcast of Light,
your bitter, wintery Day is here.
Do you slink, now, along stone
halls, tongue sharpening on
passing first-years -
or do you rest, covered in wood
and dirt and worms?
Methinks it is the former.
Every Outcast must come home,
and every Underdog must
have his Day.

OK, now you can laugh.

Tags:

• HP
• misc
• writing

Stories of Boston

The old Hancock Building on Boston harbour has a spire on top of it that incorporates a light that acts as Boston's weather vane. Colour codes represent different states of weather... with one exception as told in this old rhyme:

Steady blue, clear view.
Flashing blue, clouds due.
Steady red, rain ahead.
Flashing red, snow instead.
(except during baseball season, when it means the Red Sox game has been called off).

That's Boston for you. It's a city that strikes me as endlessly charming due to the meticulous care Bostonians have taken to preserve, catalogue and celebrate their past... but just when you start to think they're a bunch of stuffy historians, along comes a little twist that reveals their playful side, like the Red Sox worming their way onto the Hancock Building weather vane.

And then there's that story you hear about the Harvard Bridge, built across the widest point on the winding, very sedate Charles River: apparently, the two big universities, Harvard and MIT both wanted the bridge to be named after themselves. MIT insisted it had first claim, because the bridge actually leads into their campus. The row continued for a few years, before somebody from MIT, while examining the plans for the bridge, found a flaw in the way it was designed. Well, that was that for MITians... they weren't going to be associated with something that wasn't perfectly engineered, so Harvard Bridge it was.

Hmm.

Wait for the twist.

When you walk along the bridge, you notice these strange markings on it: "50 Smoots", "100 Smoots", "250 Smoots". It turns out that the official unit of measurement for the Harvard Bridge is Smoots, Smoot being a kid who had the bad luck of being the shortest guy in his batch in his freshman year at MIT. You can probably guess what happened.

In October 1958, Oliver R. Smoot was rolled head over heels across the Harvard Bridge by his fraternity brothers of MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity as part of an initiation pledge. One Smoot measures 5'7". There are markings on the bridge at every 10 Smoots, normally, though there are exceptions: the 70-Smoot mark is omitted in favor of a mark for 69; the 182.2-Smoot mark is accompanied by the words "Halfway to Hell" and an arrow pointing towards MIT. The total length of Harvard Bridge is 364.4 Smoots plus one ear.

I don't know if that's Smoot's ear or someone else's.

(Interesting asides: Wikipedia also tells me that

This was only the beginning of Smoot's career in standards and measurement; he later became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

And did you know

Google Calculator also knows about Smoots. Enter 10 feet in Smoots at Google and the calculator will tell you that 10 feet is 1.79104478 Smoots.

)

Saurabh and I were in Boston for four days this New Year's, staying with some rather cool relatives - my sister-in-law's brother-in-law and his wife, who will for convenience be called Renu and Neeraj. The day we reached there we went out in the evening to watch King Kong, which was a pretty good movie, considering how much it grossed me out. Anyway.

Not even in fantasies had I imagines that Boston would be so... Boston. Everything in Boston is the first or the oldest of its kind. On our first full day there, we toured Harvard, the oldest university in the country, which also has the largest library in the world with thirteen BILLION books. We saw the statue of John Harvard - infamously known as the statue of three lies, because the date that the statue gives as the founding year of Harvard is wrong, because John Harvard was not the founder of the university, and because in real life, the man had an ugly old mug utterly unlike the one on the statue.

See what I mean about the twists?

We had a lot of fun at Harvard. The buildings are beautiful and stately, and the one known as the Memorial Hall is quite something else - and they use it to house, among other things, a canteen for the students.. stained glass windows, Gothic spires and all. Renu, my sister-in-law-in-law-in-law (SILILIL, for short), is an amazing tour guide. She knows all the stories about everything, and regaled us endlessly with little anecdotes about the things we were looking at. All the stories here in this entry are what she told us as we went around the place.

We wandered out of Harvard and towards the train station for our next destination, stopping along the way to admire the buildings and in particular, a sign painted on one of the windows of an old building identifying it as a law firm: Dewey, Cheetham & Howe. (Say it out loud. Yup. It's a prank, there's no law firm there.) We took the train to Quincy Market, which is an old, old marketplace just by the Boston Harbour. Now there's a huge food court there and a whole bunch of souvenir shops. Outside Quincy Market, there's a big courtyard sort of place with strange markings on the stones that make up the floor of the square. The broken, jagged line marks out the original Boston Harbour line. Everything outside of the line is reclaimed land.

What a great place to play "in the pond, on the bank".

After a very filling late lunch, we wandered out of Quincy Market to christmas lights blazing on the trees on all six cylinders. It was getting pretty darn cold out, as evidenced by the many little ice sculptures that were beginning to make their appearence in the walkway outside the market.

Flashing red on the Hancock Building was what we mostly caught later that night, New Year's Eve. It's quite something to be out in a parade that gets thoroughly snowed on... but brave the cold we did. It wasn't anything great, as parades go, and one lesson that we've come away with is that there's nothing that matches a parade seen on TV - the fewer people you annoy by elbowing ahead of them in order to see something for once, the better. But the atmosphere was charged, the company was great, and no matter what, we were always in Boston, which meant we kept passing interesting little (and big) landmarks and historical sites along the way as we folowed after the parade.

For one thing, there were some fantastic ice sculptures to feast our eyes on. At Quincy Market earlier in the day, we'd already seen a lot of these but they're pretty and colourful no matter how many you've seen, so we snapped pictures again.

And here's something that gives you a sense of how everything in Boston is old and venerable... we passed an ice sculpture in the making, one of Hansel and Gretl and the witch standing at her house which, if you remember, was made of cakes and chocolate, and another ice sculpture (call it an ice-banner) announced that today was the thirtieth anniversary of this ice sculpture being made on this spot.

Anyway, that's where I'm going to leave us and this story - stamping our feet and doing tap dances to keep our toes from freezing up on us as we chatted about this and that, waiting for the fireworks to start. I can't think of a better way we could have spent New Year's eve. I can't think of a place I'd rather visit than Boston right now. I can't think of anything I'd rather do than listen to all its little stories all day.

Book Review: TALYN (Holly Lisle)

Fresh

Fast-paced

Thrilling

Intriguing

Original

Utterly engrossing

Penetrating

Masterfully characterised

.... Count the adjectives, pay attention to them, but they don't do justice to Talyn. Adjectives cannot tell you how powerfully Lisle's imagination creates the sense of being surrounded by the time and space and culture of this novel. Adjectives are impotent in describing how this novel digs its hooks into you as surely as any Feegash flesh-magery, and holds you helpless in its thrall as it unleashes terror after terror, twist after plot twist, revelation after startling revelation.

Talyn (her full name is longer, and much harder to spell) is a soldier in the Tonk Confederacy, a nation that has been at war with its neighbour, the Eastil Republic, for the better part of three centuries. It's a war that's fueled by the forces of habit and mischaracterisation of the enemy more than anything, and though as a reader, it is easy to see that the Tonks and the Eastils have a lot in common, Lisle to her credit does a superb job of keeping this realisation from her characters without the usual cheap trick of dumbing them down in contrived ways. No, Talyn is committed to her enemity with the Eastils.

Then come the Feegash, a foreign race from distant lands, who insist on brokering a peace between the two nations for the safety of the rest of the world. Talyn finds herself out of a job and purpose in life, but what disturbs her most is the enforced disarmament of the Tonks. As the warriors of Tonk begin to leave for other shores, other work, Talyn's unease deepends... but by then, she is falling in love with a Feegash diplomat who is bringing out a dark side of her she never knew existed.

Talyn struggles to keep a hold on herself as she uncovers the Feegash people's insiduous plot against her people, and is finally rescued by an Eastil prisoner of war, Gair.

The alliance is one that is anything but welcome to both Gair and Talyn. But they alone among all their kinsmen are free of the deadly magic that the Feegash have cunningly unleashed upon their shared land. Now, to save their people, their way of life, and everything they love, they must work together on a mission that rides on but a fool's hope, each trusting the honour of the other, the enemy they have been fighting three hundred years against.

The plot just grabs you from page one, and pounds you over the head with a relentless, ever more urgent chain of events. Nothing about this story is trite, or even "read it before, seen it done better"; nothing ever plays out in even remotely the way you expect. The usage of words themselves might not be Holly Lisle's strength (her writing is not the stuff of literature), but she is an awesome storyteller. This book is a testimonial to how great plot compels a reader to forgive most everything.

There are weaknesses, though, that are only fair to mention. Tiny ones, like slip-ups in point-of-view: Lisle tells her story alternatingly through Talyn's eyes, in first person, and through Gair's, in third person, but sometimes, very rarely, she shows us Talyn's thoughts while in Gair's head. There are some characters who are represented as misleadingly important in the first few chapters, only to practically disappear on us later. Some of the descriptions of magic were completely lost on me... it sometimes seemed not so much incomprehensible as improbable, perhaps because the analogies Lisle uses to explain how magic works in her world don't stretch to fit how Talyn uses it. The villainy of the Feegash was somewhat weakened when Lisle chose love as one of the motives of their mastermind - somehow makes the guy seem wimpy, you know, instead of the horrible slithery creature he is in all other respects. Plus, the ending of the book is quite rushed, which is probably the reason there's just one too many neat explanations that ties everything up in a bow. Not that's it's bad, per se, but after the brutal honesty with which Lisle treats the rest of the book, it was a bit disconcerting to see the end become so unrealistically neat and ordered.

But on to the book's strengths. Lisle's grasp of the intricacies of diplomacy and politics is once again evident in this work, and she shines as she deals with the plots and intrigues of war in her world. Her even bigger strength lies in her world-building. Talyn's despair at seeing her people's culture being thrown up in flames is our own, because by then, we are able to appreciate its beauty and rarity. In Lisle's commentary and descriptions of the differing Tonk and Eastil cultures, we gain a better understanding of our own world and our own societies... and in the end, that's what good fantasy should do.

Thumbs up for this book. Seriously. If you're going to pick up a fantasy book to read outside of Harry Potter (:D), pick this one. It's really good, and it goes easy on the weirdness factor that most often throws me off in mainstream fantasy. It's fun, it'll make you think, and it packs quite a plot punch. What more could you ask for?