Mix Yourself some Whiskey with Soda

Disclaimer: The text that follows is not worth reading if any of the following holds good:
1. Have some work at office for which your manager is right behind your back.
2. Your wife has given you a list of things to buy and you have just lost it. In which case you will have the uphill task of remembering what was there on the list lest you will be massacred.
3. You have planned to read something worthwhile for today and have summarily rejected any content that has no substance.
4. Your day looks so busy that you have planned only a few hours of sleep.

Then please refrain from continuing as i would categorize the following paragraphs as "Something of no essence"

It would not be news to any of the regular visitors of this space as the first few posts on this blog revolved around Wodehouse and his books. I have taken a long enough hiatus from that obsession and effectively refrained from writing on that topic for a while now. The reasons for the hiatus never stand to mean that i released myself from that Utopian, ethereal world of Wodehouse. After a few of my readers reprimanded me for being so obsessed that the blog was filled with praise for Wodehouse and other related posts, I decided to take a break from those topics.

But now, i have garnered the resolve to touch upon that topic once again. No! Do not Panic. This is not yet another book review. This time it is slightly different. As I had nothing worthwhile to do at office on a nice Thursday morning, I did a strange thing. I took my notepad and started penning down a few of Wodehouse's witty ones that came to mind just then. And then I realized I had a nice list: A few good ones from the best of Wodehouse! So here they go.

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun"

"Marriage isn't a process of prolonging the life of love, but of mummifying the corpse"

"A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of someone who had searched for the leak in life's gas pipe with a lighted candle"

"He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more"

"I explain this to Jeeves and he said the same thing had bothered Hamlet"

"Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver's trousers"


"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine"

"I always advise people never to give advice"

"You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower."

"Mere abuse is no criticism."

"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Aged woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."

Now, I request readers who were erstwhile criticizing my obsession towards Wodehouse to hold off from scathing attacks by way of comments. The post is basically like a mix of whiskey and soda. One needs it at regular intervals. Hence i pictured the 57th post on my blog as an "interval" and thus filled it with this restorative combination.

Tweet, Buzz and Scrap

It is the era of social networking. I have fallen prey to the evil of facebook,twitter, google buzz, linked in et.al. And as a ritual, i do the following like many others.

Logging on to facebook and checking out others' status messages
Entering google buzz and reading all shit that appears
Opening Linkedin and look for jobs and forums
Reading Gtalk status messages of all and sundry on my chat list
Open an email forward that floods my mailbox every morning

And as a result of these regular exercises...here are a few things from these spaces that caught my attention over the last few days.


Nothing's fair...except in love and war...because in love and war there are no reservations!!

If fire fighters fight fires and crime fighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight?

Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc.

Life was much simpler when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Live it or lie it

My name is Nithyananda and I am not a saint!

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why they recommend it daily

Every man dies; Not every man truly lives.

There are three sides to any argument. Your side, My side and the Right side.

These eye catching flicks come and go in our lives and i have realized that it is thought provoking and fascinating to revisit them time and again.

P.S: Having started this thread, i would make it a point to bring more of these timely and famous brickbats that catch one's attention from the social networks like a summary, once every month on this blog..

P.P.S: Only the first on that list is my own composition. The authorship of the rest should be rightly attributed to those who created them. I do not take credit for the rest on the list.

Bored??? Google it!!

I got awfully bored of getting bored too often and this time i decided what i would do the next time i get bored. Now, that in no way means that my IT job does not wear me out. It does and it does a royal rape show. But as a routine, man does come back home from work and ends up doing something outside work. So in the two hours that i get every night after getting back from work, I haven't really figured out what i can do with my laptop. I log in to gmail and check out times of india before peeping into facebook and see if anybody did anything worthwhile at all. But as life progresses,these three things get boring and so it did for me. Hence, last night i decided i should find an innovative way of killing this boredom. I did 'Google Search'!!!

Here are a few weird searches that i ended up doing:

I searched for "search" and was shocked to find Bing and search.com among the top few results. Google did not appear in the first page. What would one call this? Modesty? Imbecility? Ignorance? But somebody said there is no "google" in the search results because you've already found google!!! Shocking but true!

And then i got innovative and tried "Donkey Fart". I was shocked by the second result from Urban Dictionary. "Donkey a Fart Eater"?????? It beats me completely!!!! Urrrgghhh

Then i typed "buffalo buffalo" and i hit one of the funniest results : This

I got pissed off with that totally complex wiki page and reacted to it with "poda panni" on the search box. The result?

poda panni Chennai/Madras/சென்னை

Instantaneously i typed "nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" as a reaction to that gross disrespect to the beautiful city of chennai. And you know what? google bombarded me with a string of 'nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo's




Now intentionally, the "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" was the last of those search strings. Guess why? Any pissed off reader can now comment with a 'no' containing any number of o's to vent their frustration. :-)

Do You Challenge Queue-Jumpers and Line-Cutters?

It was a heavy doze of morning mails and i was not very gay when i entered the training room for a day long training on 'individual contributions and role behaviors' in an organization. By and large this topic didn't impress me in the first place. I held on and went through really tiring sessions on psychology, management and a host of other abstract subjects. I had to miss breakfast in the morning in order to make to the training in time (which was a mandate stringently observed).

The thing happened when we got our first break for lunch. With my tummy rolling and hunger striking me like never before, i stood in the unusual long queue in the cafeteria. I was somewhere around 37th or so when i joined the queue. That added salt to the hunger wound. And then came a small gang of 6 members who had no sense of etiquette and barged into the line as if it didn't exist. Impulsively, owing to my already built up frustration, I lost my temper and challenged that lot. After heated exchanges, they exhibited some kind of social sense to everyone's relief.

Now the reader is advised to consider the above paragraphs as a prologue to a dangerous discussion on psychology.

Disclaimer: To read on, some specific qualifications are quintessential. High levels of patience/ Interest in psychology/Both

Queue is a classic example of how groups of people automatically create social order out of chaos. But this social order can be fragile when faced with chaotic threats, like that of the queue-jumper. Suddenly we have a social psychology experiment on our hands: how fragile is this spontaneous social order and what will people do to protect it? In the answer to this seemingly mundane question may lie an important truth about our behavior in groups. Earlier, people were strangely reluctant to challenge queue-jumpers, suggesting our spontaneous social order is fairly week.

Under what conditions people would protest at queue-jumpers? It depends on two variations. The first variation is the number of intruders. The second, when there are two or more people between us and the queue-jumper, objections drop.

I mean, are we all afraid to question these brazen heads that jump queues or cut lines? No is the answer. In my opinion, there are a few reasons why we don't intervene.

1.Challenging queue-jumpers could mean losing your own place in the line.
2.Social systems have to tolerate some deviance otherwise they may quickly break down, i.e. a fight may start and everyone is delayed while it is sorted out.
3.The line is co-opting those who threaten it by tacitly accepting them so that they gain an interest in the queue and the queue becomes stronger.

After all, queue-jumping is tolerated as long as it doesn't threaten the line too much. People want to avoid social disorder because their own interests (getting served) are tied up in an orderly queue.

So, next time when you are in a queue observe how many people protest immediately at the queue jumper. If no one does, please do it yourself. Alternatively, a good idea of fun is to watch a crowded place for a queue and keep observing. Wait for intrusions and enjoy the ruckus and fights.

Happy queuing!

On Humour

I came across this quiz called "What type of Humor is yours" on Facebook and i found it pretty interesting. It was more like those common IQ tests which are famous for asking you a bunch of really unrelated questions and in the end giving a result, apparently derived from your answering pattern. This one interested me though, for the result said that my humor falls into the category of "Humor by Exaggeration".

Talking of humor, i really can't stop myself from mentioning about the nuances in PG Wodehouse' writings. That in my opinion is real humor. I call it so just because i see it covering all types and variations including- "Turn of Phrase", "Pun", "Exaggeration", "Understatement", "Irony", "Sarcasm" and "Satire". What remains to be addressed is the way each person reacts to these types of humor. It is a common observation that some people are aroused when a joke comes in the form of sarcasm and some others may like a simple turn of phrase.

When I see that humor can be classified, defined, debated and discussed, I immediately relate to how we encounter many of these instances day in and day out. Philosophy and medicine have not stopped short of recommendations relating to smile, laughter,fun and happiness as therapeutic catalysts. I appreciate the "Slapstick" form of humor specifically. It takes a chunk of inborn talent for one to be good at slap sticks. I have had a couple of friends whose colloquial discussions include a plethora of these.

These are some points that one could consider when trying to be humorous on any given occasion.

1.To be funny, the humour should be said in a spirit of fun.
2.Humour should be unannounced and told with a straight face (you don't want to laugh before your audience does).
3.The humour will die if you fumble over words or stumble during the punch line.
4.In public speaking, as it is with conversation, the telling of humour should be effortless and natural.
5.To be effective in public speaking the humour should be relevant to the points being made. It is woven into the fabric of the speech.

“Turn up the heat,” said John coldly- no matter what, 'is' a joke. But it depends on the timing of the sentence delivery. You may see how bad it looks when i have quoted it here (disastrously out of context).

To wind up, I confess boldly that I am in the middle of a small exercise to improve my hilariousness and hence the post--which I am sure is itself a huge "Slapstick" to the readers. Hope someone out there likes to read about humor.

Let the reader live in peace......Amen!!!!