Category: Odds But Not Ends
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Came across this (probably unintended) architectural misstep by the US government via Neural Gourmet. No one bothered to check the aerial view, I guess. It would have been just laughable in happier times but seems a little sinister in this day and age. The Bush regime evokes such images in our minds even in the…
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Ever since the surreal 2000 presidential elections, the world has been reeling under blow after stunning blow from natural and man made disasters. I am not the superstitious type. I don’t believe in the inauspicious confluence of planetary forces or evil demonic powers exercising their destructive will on the routine circadian rythm of life. But…
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This report combines a couple of peculiar and oddly unexpected (for different reasons) stories that were recently in the news – one from the world of entertainment and the other from the annals of medical research. Contrary to what scientists have long suspected, smoking marijuana does not appear to cause any increase in the risk…
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The US Senate hearings are a platform for our voluble senators to talk endlessly and posture before the American public and C-Span cameras. The exercise often appears to be designed for the senators to showcase their hard hitting questioning abilities, sharp wit, insider knowledge and gift of the gab. The apparent objective is to get…
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Matt at Cerulean Blue has the insider’s info on who else was in the running.
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April 18th this year was the hundredth anniversary of the dreadful San Francisco earthquake of 1906. San Francisco was shaken badly in that quake of 7.8 magnitude. An estimated 3000 people died, mostly from the resulting fires. The city and the surrounding bay area sit on two geological time bombs – the San Andreas and…
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Matt at Cerulean Blue has emerged from a bout of hibernation to report an account of a conversation between George W. Bush and Socrates.
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"Roses are red, violets are blue.. " and all the rest of it. Many rhymed, passionate, clever and crass messages were exchanged yesterday between lovers, mediated largely by Hallmark. The ancient Sumerians, 4000 years ago, knew how to put a sexually bold love poem on paper – or rather in stone. The verses did not…
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Make what you will of this story. My good friend, Sondra sent me an e-mail this morning containing the following snippet. It is quite funny, I thought. "It is amazing how time gets away from us and it is something you cannot turn back. Or at least I thought you could not turn it back…
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I am sorry, but the man had no business doing this in the first place. Doomed mouse’s revenge was anything but modest Associated Press FORT SUMNER, N.M. – A mouse got its revenge against a homeowner who tried to dispose of it in a pile of burning leaves. The blazing creature ran back to the…
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The advent of the new year in Texas has brought wild fires, unseasonably warm temps (Houston is in the low 80’s and high 70’s – I turned on the AC today) and football, football, football. The Texas football stories are running on two separate tracks, one going up and the other, way down. But both…
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I first saw this peculiar story more than two weeks ago, in a local South Asian publication while eating at an Indian restaurant. Pakistan’s notorious madrassas are breeding grounds of Islamic fundamentalism, its once vibrant universities are becoming more like those madrassas and there have been efforts to "Quranize" the college physics curriculum (attention, Kansas).…
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We know our watts, volts and ohms. Some even know their curies, faradays and fermis. But how many know our "smoots" ? Perhaps only some denizens of Cambridge, MA do. This story is so funny that I am posting it without further commentary.
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This is a story about the plight of rickshaw pullers of Calcutta, India. The state government of West Bengal wants to phase out and eventually outlaw the ancient mode of transportation, as it is deemed dangerous and demeaning to the rickshaw pullers who are uniformly poor and often in bad health. But would the job…
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