Charles Mingus, fiery temperament notwithstanding, is one of my favorite jazz musicians.

Take five... and experience it in your soul.

First up, Better Git it in your soul


Another famous hit from the same album (Ah um, an album every jazz music fan should own!)

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Another favorite of mine... Moanin'



Mingus in his New York loft, plays with his daughter, plays some piano and bass


Here he is playing a novel interpretation of Duke Ellington's 'Take the A train', with the great Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet


And last but not least... the first 10 minutes of Epitaph, his two hour long 'magnum opus' premiered by a 30-piece orchestra at the Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center and produced by Mingus's widow, Sue Graham Mingus, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2007/12/28/mme.queen.of.the.oranges.cnn

the most 300s the other day and like I wrote to you that record is held by Bradman (334 and 304) and Lara (400* and 375*).

Bradman could have been the sole holder of the record but like I was telling you on the phone, he was left stranded 299* in one test as the last man got run out for 0 when "in an attempt to keep the strike he tried a risky second run, and Australia's No. 11 Hugh "Pud" Thurlow - a fastish bowler from Queensland who was playing in his only Test - was run out by Syd Curnow's return to the wicketkeeper Jock Cameron."

Also, this 299* was in the middle of his amazing streak that began with the famous Ashes series of 1930. His streak leading up to the 299* reads: 8, 254, 334, 14, 232, 4, 25, 223, 152, 43, 226, 112, 2, 299* ...in tests against England, WI, and RSA.

Note that other than Bradman's own 334, there had been only 1 triple century then by the first-ever triple centurion, Andy Sandham, who had scored 325 when he was in his 40th year - a mega 10-hour innings at Kingston, Jamaica, when England piled up 849 off the West Indies bowling - in what was to be Sandham's last test!!

However, in the next inning after that great 299*, Bradman got a first-ball 0. That 0 came in the first inning of the (in)famous Bodyline series, where Douglas Jardine used questionable tactics to stop Bradman's flow of runs! Here's a report from wikipedia:

He withdrew from the first Test at Sydney amid rumours that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite his absence, England bowled Bodyline (as it was now dubbed) and won an ill-tempered match in which Stan McCabe scored a famous century.

The public clamoured for the return of Bradman to defeat Bodyline: "he was the batsman who could conquer this cankerous bowling... "Bradmania", amounting almost to religious fervour, demanded his return". Included as a replacement for ALan Kippax, Bradman walked to the crease on the first day of the second Test at the MCG with the score at 2/67. A world record crowd of 63,993 provided a standing ovation that delayed play for several minutes.Anticipating the bouncer first ball, Bradman moved across to play the hook shot. The ball failed to rise and he dragged it onto his stumps, thus making a first-ball duck in a Test for the first time. The crowd fell into stunned silence as he walked off.

This was the low point of Bradman's illustrious career. Bradman had gone 11 innings without a century, the longest such spell of his career, prompting suggestions that Bodyline had eroded his confidence and altered his technique.

And then came another high-point... the 1934 return series to England to reclaim the Ashes...when Bradman surged back into form with 758 runs in the 5 tests, including his 2nd triple century followed by 244 in the next test (which was part of a long-held but now-overtaken record partnership with Ponsford of 451 runs for the 2nd wicket)

P.S. When he scored 334 (his highest score) at Leeds in 1930.... he scored 309 of those runs in one day!

11 Jul, 1930: Day 1 - Australia 1st innings 458/3 (DG Bradman 309*, SJ McCabe 12*)

These days, the entire team scores 300 runs in a day and we are amazed. Bradman scored a triple ton in one day (record still holds for most runs scored by a batsman on one day.) He was in prolific form in that series and scored 974 runs at an average of 139.14 in just 7 innings!

Don Bradman set the record for most runs in a Test series during the 1930 Ashes in England. He scored 974 runs in five Tests but actually batted only seven times, hitting two double-centuries and his career-best 334. In fact, that innings alone was nearly as much as Australia's second-highest runscorer, Bill Woodfull, managed in the entire series: 345 runs at an average of 57.50.

Its perhaps been done...but some day I'll write a book on Sir Donald Bradman. The man was amazing! Jo bhi batting record dekho..he's on the list! And this after 6 decades of cricket (he retired in 1948 ..so 60 years next year) and many amazing feats of batting since then! (Given the pace at which he played, one could be sure that he would have made an amazing ODI and T20 batsman!!)


A double century and a century in the same match -- would be a nice record* to boast about when he is 80! Gavaskar (124 and 220 at Port of Spain in his debut series) being the only Indian to do it so far. (Guess who else has that enviable record -- Ganguly's friend - Greg Chappell, who scored 247* and 133 against NZ in 1974 when Ganguly was < 2 years old).

this is one of the few batting records that the prolific Bradman does not have - he never scored a 200 and a 100 in the same match (though he scored 300+ runs in a single day!.

Also, Vishal: Bradman has test records of 2 300s (shared with lara) and a record 12 200s but in first-class cricket, no one comes close to his record: 37 200s and 7 300s!! And he has 117 100s in 338 innings, better than one every three innings. Nobody else has done better than one in five. Little wonder then that he is the fastest man to 100 first-class hundreds - in a mere 295 innings (next best Denis Compton in almost twice that many - 552 - innings!) and has the highest average in first-class crickets too -- 95.14 (no other player with 25,000 runs or more above 57) to go with his now-famous 99.94 average in tests.

Having finished Making Love, I am back to reading Toussaint's Television, which I had read just 6-8 pages of some weeks back. I really like the author's writing style and so will attempt to read two of his books back to back. A break after this book in early January, when I intend to concentrate on just one non-fiction book, which I need to read for some work-related stuff - To Cork or Not to Cork by George Taber.

Anyways, I barely restarted the novel and I arrive at yet another great paragraph. Amazing..at this rate, I might be transcribing the better part of the novel here! (This one is short too - at 164 pages.) Actually, fear not - I will try my level best to not type every great paragraph from the book. However, this paragraph is a great reflection of my feelings about the "sordid intoxication" that takes over a majority of living rooms around the world every evening and I am transcribing it here.

Sometime before, as if caught up in some sordid intoxication, I'd taken to turning on the TV in the evening and watching everything there was to see, my mind perfectly empty, never choosing any particular program, simply watching everything that came my way, the movement, the glimmering lights, the variety. At the time I didn't quite realize just what was happening to me, but looking back, I see that short-lived period of overindulgence as a classic forerunner of the radical decision that was to come, as if, to make a clean break, you first had to go through such a phase of excessive consumption. In the meantime, I spent hours every evening motionless before the screen, my gaze fixed, bathed in the ever-shifting light of the scene changes, gradually submerged by the flood of images illuminating my face, the long parade of images blindly addressed to everyone at once and no one in particular, each channel being only another strand in the vast web of electromagnetic waves daily crashing down over the world. Powerless to react, I nevertheless understood full well that I was debasing myself in these long sessions before the screen, unable to drop the remote, mechanically and frenetically changing channels in a quest for sordid and immediate pleasures, swept up in that vain inertia, that insatiable spiral, searching for ever more vileness, still more sadness.

and then a great paragraph that conveys well the relentless assault of TV on our lives. Why do we put ourselves through this? Why do we miss this when/if the TV ever goes off? What has mankind come to... letting the machines take over our lives or at the very least becoming so dependent on our TVs, our game-boys, our PSPs, our Xboxes, our mobile phones, our Blackberrys...and my own poison - this PC which I use to connect to this endless web of information - the internet.

Everywhere it is the same undifferentiated images, without margins or titles, without explanation, raw, incomprehensible, noisy and bright, ugly, sad, aggressive and jovial, syncopated, all equivalent, it was stereotypical American series, it was music videos, it was songs in English, it was game shows, it was documentaries, it was film scenes removed from their context, excerpted, it was excerpts, it was the snatch of song, it was lively, the audience clapping along in time, it was politicians sitting around a table, it was a roundtable, it was the circus, it was acrobatics, it was a game show, it was joy, unbelieving stunned laughter, hugs and tears, it was a near car being won live and in color, lips trembling with emotion, it was documentaries, it was World War II, it was a funeral march, it was columns of German prisoners trudging along a roadside, it was the liberation of the death camps, it was piles of bones on the ground, it was in all languages and on more than thirty-two channels, it was in German, it was mostly in German, everywhere it was violence and gunshots, it was bodies lying in the street, it was news, it was floods, it was football, it was game shows, it was a host with his papers before him, it was a spinning wheel that everyone in the studio was watching with heads raised, nine, it was nine, it was applause, it was commercials, it was variety shows, it was debates, it was animals, it was a man rowing in the studio, an athlete rowing and the hosts looking on with anxious expressions, sitting at a round table, a chronometer superimposed over the picture, it was images of war, the sound and framing oddly uneven , as if filmed on the fly, the picture shaking, the cameraman must have been running too, it was people running down a street and someone shooting at them, it was a woman falling, it was a woman who'd been hit, a woman of about fifty lying on the sidewalk, her slightly shabby gray coat gaping half open, her stocking torn, she'd been wounded in the thigh and was crying out, simply crying out, screaming simple cries of horror because her thigh had been ripped open, it was the cries of that woman in pain, she was calling for help, it wasn't fiction, two or three men came back and lifted her onto the curb, the shots were still coming, it was archival footage, it was news, it was commercials, it was new cars gently snaking along idyllic roads in the light of the setting sun, it was a rock concert, it was series, it was classical music, it was a special news bulletin, it was ski-jumping, the crouching skier pushing off down the ramp, serenely letting himself glide onto the jump and leaving the world behind, motionless in midair, he was flying, he was flying, it was magnificent, that frozen body bending forward, motionless and immutable in midair. It was over. It was over: I turned off the television and lay still on the couch.

Phew..The above description seems to be of European TV... a similar description of TV in the US would be even worse -- I am shuddering just recalling the inane nonsense on the local evening news, followed by the even more ridiculous Hollywood/celebrity gossip shows and game shows that I let into my house every evening after work (6-7.30pm) in the past few years!! And I didn't even get to an endless stream of sports-talk or the talking heads on CNN/Fox News etc! Oh...the calamities! Now you know why I do not get TV subscription! Why would I do that to myself?

Previous excerpts from the book: 1, 2, 3.

With the demise of Oscar Peterson last weekend and Dave Brubeck & Herbie Hancock not getting any younger, it is with great joy that I read this NPR piece about the pianist prodigy Matt Savage

...barely a teenager, yet he's already played with Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Clark Terry and Jimmy Heath. It's an unlikely start for a young man who, as a young child, was unable to tolerate noise, much less appreciate music.

..

At 15, Savage is promoting and performing following the release of his sixth studio album, Hot Ticket. His list of accomplishments includes being the youngest person to be signed as a Bosendorfer piano artist and the youngest performer to have played at New York's legendary jazz club, Blue Note. Savage has also won three consecutive ASCAP "Young Jazz Composer" awards.

You can also listen to an interview with the kid on NPR's All Things Considered in 2002. And below are five youtube videos of him playing the piano.

Martinis: one is too few, three is too many. But like women’s breasts, two is superbly right, says Christopher Hitchens, in his review of the book How's Your Drink? Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well by Eric Felten.

Reminds me...wasn't there a joke that god made man with 2 hands and women with 2 breasts for a reason...or something like that? And then there was that 3-breasted android in Total Recall that made Aaahnold say 'Makes me want to have 3 hands' ;)

Finished the novella, Making Love this morning. And this is how it all ends.

There was nothing left, just a crater smoking in the faint moonlight, and the feeling of having been at the origin of this infinitely small disaster.

The unraveling of a relationship.... an 'infinitely small disaster' indeed! But one that leaves you nauseated and empty.

A page before...this monster sentence:

Marie was there. It was not, properly speaking, a hallucination, because the scene took place outside of any visual representation, in a purely mental register, in a fleeting flash of consciousness, as if I were witnessing the scene all at once without developing any of its potential components (a lightning-swift arm, a figure fleeing and falling to the ground, awful smells of fumes and burning flesh, cries, and the sound of headlong flight across the parquet floor of the museum), a scene that remained in a way imprisoned in the matrix of indeterminancy of the infinite possibilities if art and life, but that, from simple eventuality - even in its worst form - could become a reality from one moment to the next. Marie, I said in a low voice, Marie. I was shaking slightly. I was afraid. I took a step foward. No one was there.

However, at 120 words, the above long sentence pales into insignificance before this one, earlier in the book!

We had continued on our way, still without speaking, and we hadn't yet left the bridge when - turning towards Marie, who was walking silently beside me in that icy drizzle of melted snow falling on the city, as I was getting ready to make a gesture toward her, to touch her arm or take her hand - I felt as though my head were wobbling, and dovetailing with this vertigo, the rumbling of an invisible train began to make everything tremble at its passage by noisily shaking the metal latticework of the bridge parapet that began to quiver from top to bottom next to me in the sprays of bluish sparks and flashes of fire I saw spurting suddenly from a switch box below that imploded on the spot in thick black smoke that began to boil up from the tracks where a train going full-tilt slammed on the brakes trying to stop, while, in the quick look around I took behind me on the footbridge amid the swaying lampposts, I saw passersby pitching as if on the bridge of a boat heaved up by an enormous wave, brief and violent, some of them losing their balance and struggling to stay on course by accelerating as though they were hurrying in pursuit of their umbrellas, others crouching down, most of them halting right where they were, seemingly petrified, paralyzed, shielding their hands with an arm, a briefcase, an attache case. And that was all, that was absolutely all. That was all there was. Barely thirty seconds, one minute later - after a moment fraught with panic and waiting when nothing else happened and nobody moved, everyone was looking at everyone else, still crouching among the briefcases lying here and there on the ground, still livid, damp with snow, ready to hunker down and protect themselves some more, expecting the worse, an immediate aftershock, perhaps a much stronger one (it was the second earthquake in a few hours, and it could start up again at any second, the threat was now a permanent one) -- people gradually stood up and walked away, the crowd on the footbridge disappeared, while an invisible dog barked far away in the grayish dawn.

Must be a record of sorts at 241 words! It is a art to write such long sentences with the right grammar and without losing the reader - even the diligent one - but this one, perhaps lost in translation, did seem to falter on both counts.
What was being said got lost to me somewhere along the way and I did not enjoy it as much as I usually do great long sentences in say, Ian McEwan novels.

Another great quote from the novella, Making Love, which I have about 20 pages left to read.

But breaking up, I was beginning to realize was more a state of being than an action, more a period of mourning than a death agony.

Oscar Peterson died last Sunday. Big loss to the jazz and music-loving world. :(

Mr. Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a piano technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability, gratifying his devoted audiences whether he was playing in a trio or solo or accompanying some of the most famous names of jazz. His technical accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.

Enjoy the wonderful music in a few videos below of Peterson playing the piano, thanks to youtube.





and last but not least - a piano 'duel' between two piano greats - Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock.

Dress changes color with your mood

Electronics firm Philips has designed a purportedly "emotion-sensitive dress," which monitors biophysical changes associated with different human emotions. Ingrid Bal from Philip's Design said: "You could programme the material so that it turned red if you were angry or stressed, or green when you're calm."

Wonder what happens when you are in a 'naughty' mood :)

A story to warm the cockles of your heart this holiday season...

With Diet, Exercise and Friendship, David Smith Loses 400 Pounds

Hopefully inspires some people to get off their sorry whining a--es and get into action to put their lives back on track in the new year. Easier said than done!

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” - Mahatma Gandhi (He oughta know something about will power! Everything he achieved, including shaking up an empire, was based on his 'indomitable will'.)

India's Modern Maharajahs

An exhibition by Indian photographer Prashant Panjiar focuses on kings from ancient Indian royal families known as maharajahs. Accompanying it is his book, King, Commoner, Citizen.

Speaking of maharajahs...

Sultan of Brunei's uber-rich lifestyle laid bare in court case

Long before Roman Abramovich was yachting around the Mediterranean, the Sultan of Brunei was the most celebrated globe-trotting billionaire, living a life of extravagant luxury. But now he has been forced to reveal the extent of his indulgences by supplying the Privy Council in London with details of his personal finances.

The revelations have come as a result of a bitter legal battle between the world's richest monarch and his "playboy prince" younger brother, Prince Jefri. The latest chapter in a decade-long feud concerns an accusation by the Sultan that his younger brother failed to pay all of a £3bn out-of-court settlement in 2000.

And speaking of rich people...this is a couple months old but worth a mention. Wow....what a life: Almost dead at 18 months but will soon be a millionaire soon at 25, thanks to the generosity of people from that incident when she was 18 months!

Baby Jessica waits to collect $1M fund
The 18-month old girl pulled from a backyard well two decades ago is now a young wife and mother -- one waiting to collect donations given to her during her ordeal that are expected to total $1 million or more.

The post title comes from here.

Loved these lines from Making Love by the French writer (I should actually call him an artist) Jean-Philippe Toussaint

It didn't matter who was wrong -- no one, probably. We loved each other, but we couldn't stand each other any more. There was this, now, in our love: even if we continued to do ourselves on the whole more good than harm, the little harm we did do ourselves had become unbearable.

Such is life, sometimes.

Note: Took the title of this post from this profile of the author:

With each new book, Toussaint has never moved away from a certain existential emptiness, through the restless and melancholic wanderings of his characters, haunted by details, by objects, by a sense of insignificance heightened to the point of anguish: the whole world reduced and confined to the few square metres of a bathroom, the epitome of a sanitised and empty place; or the whole world contained in an everyday object that has become deadly...

A string of posts here tonight all gleaned from articles I found at Boing-Boing - The Directory of Wonderful Things.

This one - Science is linguistic as well as numerical - is about a comment about a recent Scientific American article on gender bias in science and math and is one that makes me feel good!

Why? Because one way or the other, I can now truly claim that I am a scientist. Not just because I have a PhD and am in research & development (R&D) but because I love words, language and literature that complements my analytical mind.

Now if only I could get it to focus on one thing. Too many things to read, to little time to do anything myself....and this internet ain't helping! Time to log out and go read a book or something. Au revoir....until tomorrow!

I heard about this master photographer earlier today in the context of his latest book of photographs: Africa (Hardcover - Oct 31, 2007).

The celebrated Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado has recorded numerous major upheavals on the African continent, beginning in the mid-1970s -- wars of independence, civil wars, drought, famine, genocide. In "Africa" (Taschen: 336 pp., $59.99), more than 300 of his photographs, dating from 1974 to 2006, are beautifully reproduced. They are disturbing images -- a record of extreme human and natural violence -- and they are also heartbreaking, because the Africa of your childhood imagination is here too: the stupendous skies, the moss-laden forests, the gorillas on the flanks of a volcano, the migrating wildebeests, a solitary leopard drinking its fill in the Barab River valley. All of these photographs have an eerie immediacy you can get lost in. - LA Times review

Brazil's Sebastião Salgado's black and white work from the 1970s onwards has focused on developments in the Third World. It seems Salgado discovered photography while working as an economist for the World Bank. He is now one of the world's greatest photographers .

He has a # of books full of great photographs but to get a flavor look at

- First up... some pictures of Africa probably from the recent book via a Google-Image search.

- this series appearing in the Guardian over 8 years (2004-2012). Apparently, "he is seeking out places that are still as pristine as they were in primeval times, places that provide hope. First stop, the Galapagos Islands."

- this excerpt of images from his 2000 book "Migrations"

- and this great series in the NYT about land reform movement in his native Brazil.

Amit Varma has an interesting article today in which he calls for a rethink on doping in sports, be it through genetic modifications or other means. While I may not agree with everything he says, some thought will have to be given to the arguments he makes over the next few decades as the era of ‘designer’ sportsmen (and ‘designer’ human beings, in general) dawns. One can argue for or against his claim such modifications actually make for a level playing field but there is no argueing that for better or for worse, this genetic revolution is coming and will impact the way we lead our lives much more than that caused by the industrial revolution in the 19^th century or even the technology and physics revolutions in the 20^th century.

Without going into too much details – because the topic is too broad and controversial (the temptations of eugenics, anyone?) for me to make minor points for or against it here – let me express one concern I have, specific to sports. Does letting genetic tailoring of athletic prowess provide an unfair advantage to those with money and the privilege to get these so-called upgrades on their systems. Surely there is some of this disadvantage today – in some sports more than others - but far too often we hear of athletes from families with limited means going on to achieve a lot through their natural talents and hard work. A genetically modified world undoubtedly will stand to leave such people behind.

In any case, I will leave you with an interesting quote that I gleaned from an earlier article Amit wrote some years back at the popular cricket site, Cricinfo. This is excerpted from Francis Fukuyama's book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, an alleged (alleged because I have not read it - not saying it ain't so) "polemic against genetic engineering":

The deepest fear that people express about technology is ... that, in the end, biotechnology will cause us in some way to lose our humanity - that is, some essential quality that has always underpinned our sense of who we are and where we are going, despite all of the evident changes that have taken place in the human condition through the course of history. Worse yet, we might make this change on the without recognizing that we had lost something of great value. We might thus emerge on the other side of a great divide between human and post-human history and not even see that the watershed had been breached because we lost sight of what that essence was.

Related books:

In addition to the afore-mentioned ‘polemic’ by Fukuyama, read the book I borrowed the title of this post from:

Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future by James Hughes

And couple books that take the pro-genetic-modifications stance:

Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future by Gregory Stock

More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement by Ramez Naam

Also: Remaking Eden by Lee M. Silver and Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications by Erik Parens (editor)

and last but not least - an interesting debate between the two schools of thought.

"Life is about learning, gaining experience and in that process we have a tendency to observe and mimic the actions of others. Ideally we mimic what makes others successful and avoid unsuccessful actions others have trialed (and paid for). In reality, humans seem to have the tendency to mimic the overall behaviour pattern of higher status or more successful others. This explains why celebrities act as role models for broad ranges of behaviour they display - good or bad."

That's Charlotte De Backer of the University of Leicester who found that Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai serve as more influential role models for youngsters in Indiathan any of the famous figures from history! Take that, Gandhi!

Sigh!

Also see my earlier post with a quote about our celebrity pop culture.

Eat ur fruits, veggies, and legumes...

A polyphenol antioxidant is a type of antioxidant containing a polyphenolic substructure. In human health these compounds, numbering over 4000 distinct species, are thought to be instrumental in combating oxidative stress, a syndrome causative of some neurodegenerative diseases and some cardiovascular diseases.

The main source of polyphenol antioxidants is nutritional, since they are found in a wide array of phytonutrient-bearing foods. For example, most legumes; fruits such as apples, blackberries, blueberries, cantaloupe, cherries, cranberries, grapes, pears, plums, raspberries, and strawberries; and vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, celery, onion and parsley are rich in polyphenol antioxidants. Red wine, chocolate, green tea, olive oil, bee pollen and many grains are alternative sources.

Surrogate Mothers: Womb for Rent

Customer service, tech support...these days we outsource everything to India. So why not pregnancy? Here is a report on the growing number of Indian women willing to carry an American child.

When they said... oursource your life ... I didn't think they meant this!

Scientistis used a combination of drugs and genetic manipulation to turn the homosexual behavior of fruit flies on and off within a matter of hours.

While the genetic finding supports the thinking that homosexuality is hard-wired, the drug finding surprisingly suggests it's not that simple. Homosexuality is widespread in the animal world. But scientists have long debated whether, in humans a "gay gene" exists. Previous research in humans has suggested that how we interpret scents given off by another person might impact our sexuality.

Elsewhere, scientists studied zombie cockroaches

A new study has shown that cockroaches that turned into "zombies" after being stung by a parasitic wasp can be revived with an antidote. Cockroaches can lose their ability to walk when stung by jewel wasps (Ampulex compressa) – the females of which use the cockroaches to feed their young. The wasp, being much smaller than the cockroach, has evolved a fine sting that can deliver a venom cocktail directly into the cockroach’s brain. The poisons effectively turn the cockroach into a zombie.

No more cat-n-mouse games?

Cat and mouse may never be the same. Japanese scientists say they've used genetic engineering to create mice that show no fear of felines, a development that may shed new light on mammal behavior and the nature of fear itself.

and elsewhere...

A team of Korean scientists led by Kong Il-keun, a cloning expert at Gyeongsang National University, produced three cats possessing altered fluorescence protein (RFP) genes, whereby the cats glow under ultraviolet beams.

Aaah... the wonders of science! Mankind is going to face some mighty ethical questions this next century.

Zipcar works great but I don't need a car. I could do with a bike to get to work or run errands in town instead of walking to work or taking the car out to go 2-3 miles for groceries! Actually, the plan is to do away with the car at some point and get a Vespa but I still need to get groceries in snowy winter months when bikes and scooties cannot be really used. The bus system exists but is too infrequent over weekends to depend on it though I suppose its a question of being pampered too much in the Western world! People in most parts of the world use far worse public transportation systems for everything they do in their daily lives without much of a whimper. Actually, I should stop blogging about this and take concrete actions to get rid of the car (not worth paying the insurance for merely using it to get groceries during the weekend. On weekdays, it stays put at home since I walk to work and my wife takes the bus or rides a bike to the T-station) and buy a bike (and maybe buy a Vespa next summer.) I could so easily survive using a vespa, a bike, and an occasional zipcar rental. Maybe that's going to be my new year resolution! So anyone wants to pay premium dollars to buy a well-maintained 2002 VW Passat with less than 40,000 miles on it?

“Now that the mystique of so many celebrities is rooted less in their accomplishments than in their ability to get our attention by provoking our disgust, perhaps it’s not fame they’re offering but ‘fame-iness.’” - Feb. 17, 2007, Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times (Found here.)

No mystique ...just disgust here at the various shenanigans of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and the like.

Mark Peters on the Colbert Suffix

In his fantastic book On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt says a bullshitter “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Maybe that has something to do with why Stephen Colbert’s bullshit synonym "truthiness" has hit the linguistic spot like few words in recent years: It names the degraded condition of truth in media, government, nonfiction, and elsewhere. "Truthiness" has been so successful that it’s begun fathering children—"fameiness," "referenciness," and others—that demonstrate the Colbert suffix, a timely new meaning of an old word ending that allows writers to spoof and skewer our regular diet of drivel and twaddle.

Speaking of new words, clearly, I am not up to speed with online phenomenon be it social networking or gaming! I had never heard of this 'word' before. (Clearly, I am regressing over time. I was so in-the-know just 5 years ago when 'Doh' was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2002. ;))

Merriam-Webster's word of '07: 'w00t':

"W00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Elsewhere... The Oxford dictionary, like the Nobel committee, falls victim to political correctness and joins the green bandwagon.

The word of the year is a phrase. Go figure.
The word of the year is a phrase. Go figure. ... The Oxford American English Dictionary has chosen carbon neutral as its word of the year.

Speaking of words...check this one out by which Amit Varma finally recognizes the degenerate me... :) (But in my defence, I just like words. Especially words like onomatopoeia. :))

Also, if you really are a wordsmith, check out BBC TWO's Balderdash & Piffle.

The Oxford English Dictionary asked for public assistance to help them trace the history of 40 well-known words and phrases. From 'identity theft' to 'pole dance', Balderdash & Piffle's wordhunters stopped at nothing to do their bit for the English language. Thanks to an outstanding response from the public, viewers of the television series will have seen Victoria Coren persuade the OED's editors to rewrite the entries for 27 of the 40 words on the Wordhunt list.

In the novel Television, after the bit about the protagonist's enjoyment of swimming comes a great write-up about the 'spectacle' of television and its illusion of reality ..

Television offers the spectacle not of reality, although it has all the appearances of reality (on a smaller scale, I would say -- I don't know if you've ever watched television), but rather of its representation. It is true that television's apparently neutral representation of reality, in color and in two dimensions, seems at first glance more trustworthy, authentic, and credible than the more refined and much more indirect sort of representation painters use to create an image of reality in their works; but when artists represent reality, they do so in order to take in the outside world and grasp its essence, while television, if it represents reality, does so in and of itself, unintentionally you might say, through sheer technical determinism, or incontinence. But the fact that television offers a familiar and immediately recognizable image of reality does not mean that its images and reality can be considered equivalent. Unless you believe that reality has to resemble its representation in order to be real, there's no reason to see a Renaissance master's portrait of a young man as any less faithful a vision of reality than the apparently incontestable video image of an anchorman, world-famous in his own country, reading the news on a TV screen.

A Renaissance painting's illusion of reality, rooted in colors and pigments, in oils and brushstrokes, in delicate retouches with the brush or even the finger, or a simple smearing of the slightly damp linseed oil paste with the side of the thumb, the illusion that you have before you something living, flesh or hair, fabric or drapery, that you stand before a complex, human person, with his flaws and weaknesses, someone with a history, with his own nobility, his sensitivity, his gaze -- just how many square millimeters of paint does it take to create the force of that gaze, looking down through the centuries? -- (which) by its nature is fundamentally different from the illusion offered by television when it represents reality, the purely mechanical result of an uninhabited technology.

Ok..that's all I have read so far and I am sure there are more gems in the book but realize that over the last three posts, I have transcribed a large percentage of the first few pages of this novel and so need to stop here. Go read the book if it leaves you desiring more. :)

Suffice it is to say that I have enjoyed the little that I have read of Touissaint - though I should say I enjoyed Making Love (no..not the physical act but the novel though I am yet to meet a person who would admit to not enjoying the act in itself) more than reading Television but both novels and the author's writing style are surely delectable and interesting.

Previous excerpts from the book: 1, 2.

No... not simultaneously though that in itself might be another interesting art!

I refer to this paragraph from the aforementioned novel Television, from which it is clear that the protagonist quite enjoys swimming as well as making love. He writes:

I rank swimming very highly among the pleasures that life has to offer us, having in the past somewhat underestimated it and placed it rather far behind physical love, which was until now my favorite activity, apart from thinking, of course. I do in fact very much like making love (on more than one account), and, without going into my own personal style in that domain, which is in any case closer to the sensual quietude of a leisurely breast-stroke pool length than to the surging, swaggering outburst of a four-hundred meter butterfly race, I will say above all that making love brings me an immense inner equilibrium, and that, the embrane at an end, as I lie dreamily on my back on the soft sheets, savoring the simple companionship of the moment, I find myself in an irrepressible good mood, which appears on my face as a slight, unexpected smile, and something gleaming in my eye, something light-hearted and knowing. And it turns out that swimming brings me the same sort of satisfaction, that same bodily plentiude, slowly spreading to the mind, like a wave, little by little, giving birth to a smile.

Phew.. that was one sentence. Beautiful! Blaah then to V. S. Naipaul's #1 rule for writers: "Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words."

That said, I agree that Naipaul has some important nuggets of advice but I quite like Vonnegut's wit and charm (as against Naipaul's acerbic petulance?) and so it is Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing that I will aim to adopt :)

By the way, both the above links about the rules of writing lead to India Uncut blog posts, where Amit Varma has a nice series of posts on the topic of writing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

When I picked up Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Making Love, I also picked up another short novel by him - Television - and had thought I'd read one or the other, depending on which one I like more. Having started the former and loving the 20-odd pages I have read so far, I should have returned the latter along with some other books this weekend. However, instead of reading the two books I have already started (Making love and Mogador), I started reading Television last night.

The premise of the book is that an academic, on sabbatical in Berlin, decides to shut off his TV to concentrate on writing about the painted Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, initials: T. V.), only to become "hyper-attuned to the medium's pervasiveness. " (quote from Publishers Weekly, © Reed Business Information)

In the first few pages, he leads us through his recent routine of watching the French Tennis Open from afternoon to nightfall, which left him "nauseated and numbed mind empty, legs limps, eyes bleary." He writes:

Apart from that I did nothing. By doing nothing, I mean doing nothing impulsive or mechanical, nothing dictated by habit or laziness. By doing nothing, I mean doing only the essential, thinking, reading, listening to music, making love, going for walks, going to the pool, gathering mushrooms. Doing nothing, contrary to what people rather simplistically imagine, is a thing that requires method and discipline, concentration, an open mind.

Later, in writing about his daily routine of going for a leisurely swim (more about that in the next post), he writes:

"But high performance isn't my goal."

And that, I say, is in itself a noble mighty goal. :)

A scathing review of Shashi Tharoor’s latest book: The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the twenty-first century

A newspaper column is, as demonstrated by its best practitioners, a minor but nevertheless demanding art form, the essence of which is to give memorable expression to the topical by linking it to deeper realities. Those who carry it off most successfully on the Indian scene—Ramachandra Guha, Vir Sanghvi, Girish Shahane, Santosh Desai, Mukul Kesavan, Swaminathan S. Aiyar—delight and provoke us not only with their command over their subject but also their flair for shrewd generalisation and the economy and lucidity of their expression. Sadly none of these qualities are visible in Shashi Tharoor’s The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, a ragbag of columns and op-eds in which ancient platitudes, second-hand insights, and tacky witticisms are aimed at the reader with a quite breathtaking conviction. Tharoor has never been a very good columnist anyway, so his unwise (but in some ways perfectly characteristic) decision to gather up his jottings only serves to expose more clearly his considerable shortcomings in the realm of both thought and expression.

More at Chandrahas Choudhury’s blog

Found this review through a post at India Uncut, which linked to the Pragati magazine, an Indian National Interest Review magazine. (Pragati translates to Progress in Hindi.)

Also, another trenchant review in The Telegraph, that concludes... "proving once again that he is more of a diplomat than a writer." Ouch!

That said, I had quite enjoyed reading Tharoor's India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond almost a decade back - more for his childhood reminiscences of vacations in Palghat than the writing about India's recent history.

For a good read of India's history, read Stephen Wolpert's India and John Keay's book, India: A History, both of which I read in the 90s and found immensely scholarly and educative. I believe Wolpert has some more recent books - A New History of India in 2003 and Encyclopedia Of India in 2005 - but I have not read these.

This excerpt is from an essay, The Writer's Kitchen by Rosario Ferre and translated by Diana L. Velez, which was first published in Feminist Studies (Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 227-242, Summer, 1986).

Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons: Emily Bronte wrote to confirm the revolutionary nature of passion; Virginia Woolf wrote to exorcise her terror of madness and death; Joan Didion writes to discover what and how she thinks; Clarisse Lispector discovered in her writing a reason to love and be loved. In my case, writing is simultaneously a constructive and a destructive urge, a possibility for growth and change. I write to build myself word by word, to banish my terror of silence; I write as a speaking, human mask. With respect to words, I have much for which to be grateful. Words have allowed me to forge for myself a unique identity, one which owes its existence only to my own efforts. For this reason, I place more trust in the words I use than perhaps I ever did in my natural mother. When all else fails, when life becomes an absurd theater, I know the words are there, ready to return my confidence to me. This need to construct that moves me to write is closely tied to my need for love: I write so as to reinvent myself, to convince myself that what I love will endure.

But my urge to write is also destructive, an attempt to annihilate myself and the world. Words are infinitely wise and, like all mothers, like nature herself, they know when to destroy what is worn out or corrupt so that life may be rebuilt on new foundations. To the degree that I take part in the corruption of the world, I turn my instrument against myself. I write because I am poorly adjusted to reality; because the deep disillusionment within me has given rise to a need to re-create life, to replace it with a more compassionate, tolerable reality. I carry within me a utopian person, a utopian world.

This destructive urge that moves me to write is tied to my need to hate, my need for vengeance. I write so as to avenge myself against reality and against myself; I write to give permanence to what hurts me and to what tempts me. I believe that deep wounds and harsh insults alone might someday release within me all the creative forces available to human expression, a belief which implies, after all, that I love the world passionately.

If you have access to JSTOR, you can read the entire essay here.

Bad habit #1: Procrastination. Some day there won't be a tomorrow.

Bad habit #2 (though of much less impact than #1): Start another book to read before finishing the ones I am already reading.

I had picked up 6-7 short novellas the last time I was at the public library and so this morning, I started with another one although I have read just the first few pages of both Making Love and The Man of Feeling, both very excellent books. Today's novella, Mogador by the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sanchez (wow..all three books currently being read are in translation. In fact, two other books that are next on the list are also translations - Marguerite Yourcenar's A Blue Tale and Other Stories and White Walls - Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya, who is the great-grandniece of the Tolstoy we all know.

Anyways, Mogador, which as the book-flap says combines elements of Latin American magic realism with geometric and mystical imagery of Arabic literature is written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities."

When a book starts with the following sentence that captures you right away... how could I resist? :)

Seen this way, the horizon does not exist; it is placed there by the gaze, a thread snapping with each blink of the eye.

From the little I have read so far I can tell that this book is losing a lot in translation. I wish I knew two languages: Spanish and French. The former to read great Spanish literature, especially poetry by Neruda and Octavio Paz, both of which I have enjoyed immensely in English translations and the latter to enjoy French movies.

I am usually not a fan of magic realism -- blame it on my lack of creativity and imagination -- though some day I hope to read more of Gabriel Marquez (I have tried to read three of his novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Of Love And Other Demons, and Love in the Time of Cholera at various points in the past decade or so but not really read them enough to enjoy these masterpieces. I also kinda read his latest novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores though I definitely did not do this short novella justice either by reading bits and pieces here and there!)

However, that said, I do think I will read the book Mogador in its entirety as it is a real short one.

Also, coincidentally, though I had never heard of Alberto Ruy Sanchez nor of Marguerite Yourcenar before I picked up this latest set of books at the library, Sanchez' book starts with a quote by Yourcenar.

"Unaware, we all enter the amorous dreams of those who cross our path or surround us. And this despite the ugliness, poverty, age, or misery of the person desiring, and despite the modesty or timidity of the one being coveted, without regard to that person's own desires, wich may be focused on someone else. Thus we each open our body to all and surrender it to all." - MY

Not much time to blog - work has surprisingly gathered new feet late in the year and is going to be busy going ahead (which is not necessarily a bad thing.)

So, here we go with a few links to some interesting snippets of scientific news that I have run into in the past few weeks.

A wiring diagram of the brain: The emerging field of connectomics could help researchers decode the brain's approach to information processing.

Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven, or Patterns of Creativity
A talk by Nobel laureate in Phyiscs, the late S. Chandrasekhar

The secret lives of two elements, as uncovered by Sandia researchers

Stem cell breakthrough that uses no embryos

A new device could help dentists better detect the early signs of tooth decay

Atomic scale microscopy a hundred times faster

Learning how to play hide and seek from nature

Trapping a rainbow: A new technique to slow down, stop and capture light

Superstrong carbon nanotube fibers strong enough to stop bullets

And last but not least..

Mice that sniff out CO2 in the air

Bacteria that produce abundant, clean hydrogen from cellulose, or even vinegar, and a little electricity

"Pumped-up" materials

Self-assembling 'magnetic snakes'

and gels that change color on demand!

Such brilliant minds. The mind boggles and bows in humility. But then there is a sudden feeling of disappointment that floods the mind when I read news from the real world that one cannot tell apart from satire snippets from The Onion. For example, this news that Tweety & Donald Duck have been summoned to court!