New Toilet Reading

It's been a while since I blogged. First I was traveling, then I caught a fever and a sore throat, then I just realized my life was too boring to blog about, and then just when I thought I'd put up a post anyway, bombs went off all over Bangalore and blogging just didn't seem like top priority anymore, y'know. Anyway, yesterday I was at the Landmark bookstore at the Forum mall, and I flipped through the new edition of Rolling Stone India, which I then bought today and hope shall provide sufficiently interesting reading in the loo for a couple of weeks to come. It had this interview with Chris Martin of Coldplay, titled, 'The Jesus of Uncool'. While it's obvious that Martin is quite media-savvy now despite any appearance of un-cool-ness, with interesting sound bytes strewn throughout the interview, I found this quote really interesting:

But despite it all, Martin can't stop feeling like an underdog. 'You've got to be hungry,' he says. 'If your wife went out with Brad Pitt, you'd want to prove yourself, you know what I mean?'

I'm not sure if I should dislike him for being a wannabe with a Hollywood star for a wife, or like him more for being truthful about it. Makes him more human than, say, St. Bono of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Incidentally, after I got back from Landmark I turned on the news to find that a live bomb had been found and defused near the mall that morning. No wonder there weren't that many people around.

Guaranteed to make your Monday more fun

I came across this video through this article on Slate about cross-genre covers (also listed in my list of shared articles on the right, if you're reading the blog, and which is available separately here if you're viewing this in your RSS reader and want to see what I've been reading on the net lately):

I can't figure out who Alanis was really trying to spoof - Fergie and the Black-eyed Peas, or Alanis herself and her usual woe-is-me vocals. Either way, it works.

If I haven't called you in a while

If I haven't called you in a while
You can rest assured that I'll
Get around to it sometime
I just have a lot of other stuff to take care of
Work and paying the bills and
Trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day.

If you haven't called me in a while
I understand, you don't want me around cramping your style
I'm pretty good at piddling on other people's parades
You've got enough other stuff to take care of anyway
Work and paying the bills and
Trying to figure out what to do over the weekend.

If I haven't called in a while
It's because I wouldn't want to impose myself.

Bulls in Bowties: The Koramangala Test Kitchen

Ingredients:
1/2 a pack of Sunfeast Benne Vita farfalle, though you could use pretty much any pasta
2 coffee mugs of water
1 helping of dry Mallu beef curry (olathiya erachi) that your aunt made for you a week ago and has been lying in your fridge ever since
1 brand new, unopened jar of salsa
2 eggs
1 album by the Rolling Stones, preferably Exile on Main Street

Preparation:
Bring the water to a rapid boil in the deepest vessel you've got. While it's boiling, start playing your Rolling Stones album. This will accomplish 2 things, namely (a) get you in a nice and enthu mood, and (b) remind you that no matter how bad the shit is that you might end up eating today, Mick Jagger's probably ingested worse into himself, and yet he's still bouncing around and getting action from women old enough to be his grand-daughters, so you're probably not going to end up too badly. Once the water is boiling, drop in the pasta and start stirring. You need to stir for about 10-12 minutes, so you better have the music on to keep you entertained. As the pasta gets softer and more cooked, i.e. chewy, drop in the beef and keep stirring till there's hardly any water left.
Serve on whichever plate you've got. It will look like this*:



Serves 2, or 1 if you're really hungry**.

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*Real men don't use garnish.

**Astute readers might notice that 2 of the above ingredients were never mentioned, and may hence consider them superfluous. In fact they serve a most important function: backup. If you can't cook anything else, break a couple of eggs into a pan with some salsa and oil or butter, scramble until cooked, et voila, you have a meal.

I have my freedom, but I don't have much time

I've managed to set up a Wifi network in my house, which means I can now surf the net anywhere in my little itty-bitty one-bedroom apartment. That is, until my laptop's battery runs out-which, considering that it is about two years old, takes approximately half an hour-at which point I must submit to the tyranny of the power cord. Still it's the principle that matters, and I shall live (somewhat) wire-free till such time as the radio waves from my router combine with the radiation from my cell-phone and my microwave to fry me to a crisp.