i had a small chat with the roomie arguing that rahman would never win a grammy cos though his music rocks, he doesnt have hips...ok what i meant was that a shakira with her ruthless truthless hips was bound to hit the charts and have more exposure just cos she was more marketable than a reserved man from south india (that vande mataram video was awesome but was probably a bit too patriotic for an american awards show).
fear not for the desi sound though..hottest record of the world this past week on bbc radio 1's zane lowe show..mathangi arulpragasam aka M.I.A gets down and does the koothu at miauk.com
update: the video is on m.i.a's psychedelic site..Ux aka my legal counsel prevailed and made me pull the plug on youtube
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
plumbers wanted
at first there was dial up and the bits dripped to us through our ultra thin telephone lines like water out of chennai taps. then came tcp/ip connections or as we liked to call it "the one with more pictures of [insert covergirl/actress name here] than you would ever be able to see in your lifetime". these days the net is 'free' and i have a decent number of feeds in my rss reader. more than half of those go unread. lets just say that if the information onslaught were a snowstorm, it would take a while for us to dig our cars out. realising that bloggers like me might soon start misusing more weather related analogies, yahoo decided to introduce a spanking new snowblower called pipes
the pipes are a neat tool. quite like their unix counterparts. they are meant to let you create a sort of filter to retrieve the essence of the growing information stockpile. it took me a while to figure out that it does not work with safari or opera (the faqs mention it, i didnt think to read there first).but on camino/firefox i found it rather easy to hook up my blog to one of their 'modules', produce a stream of keywords from the titles of my posts and then pass it on to flickr which promptly displayed images that were not at all related to my blog. a quick search revealed that a hundred other folks had applied pretty much the same logic and so there are a lot of flickr related pipes already. tim o'reilly has more on this in a neat write up
pipes are new. the buzz will be enough to cause several bloggers suffering writer's block to chime in with their thoughts.they are still a little tied down in terms of what they allow one to do. but i'm sure they will catch on, more features will be added and ppl will probably clone that flickr pipe and apply it to youtube and google videos eventually creating seveal more ways to search for porn. but for the rather brief time that i tinkered with it, it made me feel a little intelligent. so get off that rss reader's scroll button and make yourself a nice, warm cup of filtered information. its a blizzard out there.
here is the link again: http://pipes.yahoo.com
the pipes are a neat tool. quite like their unix counterparts. they are meant to let you create a sort of filter to retrieve the essence of the growing information stockpile. it took me a while to figure out that it does not work with safari or opera (the faqs mention it, i didnt think to read there first).but on camino/firefox i found it rather easy to hook up my blog to one of their 'modules', produce a stream of keywords from the titles of my posts and then pass it on to flickr which promptly displayed images that were not at all related to my blog. a quick search revealed that a hundred other folks had applied pretty much the same logic and so there are a lot of flickr related pipes already. tim o'reilly has more on this in a neat write up
pipes are new. the buzz will be enough to cause several bloggers suffering writer's block to chime in with their thoughts.they are still a little tied down in terms of what they allow one to do. but i'm sure they will catch on, more features will be added and ppl will probably clone that flickr pipe and apply it to youtube and google videos eventually creating seveal more ways to search for porn. but for the rather brief time that i tinkered with it, it made me feel a little intelligent. so get off that rss reader's scroll button and make yourself a nice, warm cup of filtered information. its a blizzard out there.
here is the link again: http://pipes.yahoo.com
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
slide show
a parrot riding on a monkey sitting on a cart pulled by a labrador. this strange menagerie working with such symbiosis is rarely spotted in nature. i spotted it in an awesome movie called durga a long while ago(and yes i watched it more than once to be sure). however this one is not about any of these species because there is one creature that above all is revered in the indian movie industry. it appeared in this movie too but i dont think it had a license or it would have also driven something.
if one were to slice the tamil/telugu movie industry pie based on species ( omitting homo sapien sapiens to avoid statistical skew and the use of mathematical terms), you will see that nearly the whole pie is taken up by the hisstrionics of various snakes (sorry abt the typo heh heh). there is a thin sliver that is occupied by the monkeys, parrots, dogs (all of whom were at one time or another called ramu) and the lone camel that bit goundamani in indian but i dont think they emote as well or contribute as much to a story as our reptilian friends do. u can watch any movie whose title has the 3 letter code 'nag' embedded in it and be assured of learning nothing about the reptilian life cycle. pretty much the only take home message from these movies is dont mess with snakes in heat. also beware of women wearing light colored contact lenses and forked tongues who love milk and steer you away from the mongoose cage at the zoo.
snakes have also appeared in several non-NAG movies. they would often play wingman to the heroes - frightening their lady loves and enabling the heroes to step in and display their courage. wont work as well if a cow or say a bunny were trying to scare the lady. they also play able henchmen helping villains to swiftly eliminate foes. there are very few folks who'd be scared of a villain with a monkey on his shoulder, unless it were a gorilla that is. you get where i am going. snakes are indispensable to a good movie.the ultimate movie however would pit a viciously venomous viper against the courageous captain. snake after snake would bite the captain and fall down dead while the captain would grin and say "paambu enna kadicha saak adichu sethu poidun" . would make the dog and monkey act look like a street act, i tell ya.
if one were to slice the tamil/telugu movie industry pie based on species ( omitting homo sapien sapiens to avoid statistical skew and the use of mathematical terms), you will see that nearly the whole pie is taken up by the hisstrionics of various snakes (sorry abt the typo heh heh). there is a thin sliver that is occupied by the monkeys, parrots, dogs (all of whom were at one time or another called ramu) and the lone camel that bit goundamani in indian but i dont think they emote as well or contribute as much to a story as our reptilian friends do. u can watch any movie whose title has the 3 letter code 'nag' embedded in it and be assured of learning nothing about the reptilian life cycle. pretty much the only take home message from these movies is dont mess with snakes in heat. also beware of women wearing light colored contact lenses and forked tongues who love milk and steer you away from the mongoose cage at the zoo.
snakes have also appeared in several non-NAG movies. they would often play wingman to the heroes - frightening their lady loves and enabling the heroes to step in and display their courage. wont work as well if a cow or say a bunny were trying to scare the lady. they also play able henchmen helping villains to swiftly eliminate foes. there are very few folks who'd be scared of a villain with a monkey on his shoulder, unless it were a gorilla that is. you get where i am going. snakes are indispensable to a good movie.the ultimate movie however would pit a viciously venomous viper against the courageous captain. snake after snake would bite the captain and fall down dead while the captain would grin and say "paambu enna kadicha saak adichu sethu poidun" . would make the dog and monkey act look like a street act, i tell ya.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)