Kevin Bacon Ho!

You have to check this thing out. The oracle of Bacon can give you hours of fun. It links any actor on IMDB to Kevin Bacon in less than 6 movies. Incredible! Kevin Bacon is at the center of the movie universe apparently. So far, I've been able to link Mithun da, Amisha Patel, Saira Banu (yes her!) to Kevin Bacon. Lets see if you can find someone who isn't linked to Kevin by less than 6 movies.

Is Chetan Bhagat "Inspired"?

Right, so I'm reading this book called "One night @ the call center" by Chetan Bhagat. Chetan is one of those rare Indian authors who writes in English, but whose target audience actually are English speakers living in India. Unlike your Rushdie or Arundhati Roy (or V.S. Naipaul and countless others of that ilk), he does not concentrate on the side of India that the average Indian just does not encounter that often. Which is to say, he is an Indian author who writes like an Indian author and refrains from adopting the condescending western attitude that one sees in the writings of the aforementioned authors. Whats even better however is that this guy's books are actually priced low enough to be affordable to most of India's reading public.

With that last paragraph, I hope to firmly establish that I like what Chetan's doing and would definitely like to see more writing like his. However, the reason I wrote up this post is because I found something quite startling in the book. Around page 161, some of the characters in the book decide to play a game called "radio jockey". What goes on after that is almost an exact recreation of this real life event (happened on Andy Savage's show) that became something of an urban legend on the Internet a few years ago. Now what I want to know is that whether or not there is a game called "radio jockey" or if Chetan's just been "inspired" by Andy Savage's show. Can anybody out there answer that? Because if he has picked up this scenario just to incorporate it into his story, I think he ought to at least acknowledge the fact that it is something that actually happened. I don't write a lot of fiction (come to think of it, I don't think I've written any at all) and I don't know what the ethical and moral constraints are when one fictionalizes a real life incident like this, so I'd like someone to tell me if what he's done was indeed the right thing to do.

Verbosity, thy Name is NDTV

Found this little turd from a grammar poor writer on the NDTV web site today. Some quotes:

"From the very beginning even in their infancy, video games were able to capture the hearts and minds of all..." - No shit! So infancy is what happens in the beginning? Here I was thinking people came down to earth as fully grown adults.

"...and it's just a matter of time before video games become as big as Hollywood..." - Uh...that happened about 3 years ago already. Or didn't you hear. Can you say research?

"Present day computer games very realistic and detailed. However they are are much more resource intensive too." - Its language, not math. You can't skip a word in one sentence and then make it up in the next one. No really, you can't!

"There is more interactive entertainment and at present is bigger than movies." - Oi! If you're going to contradict yourself, at least have the decncy to do it on the next page or something.

If You Have Respect for Beer...

...you should watch this. Its a new commercial for one of my favorite brands of beer (you'll know which one right away). I originally wanted to use the punch line for the heading to this post, but its great when you eventually see it in the commercial. Really. Enjoy!

Ye Olde Arun

A lot has changed since I dropped out of my mother. So much in fact, that I almost feel old. Yup, I could pretty much gather a few kids around me and go "Hamare zamane mein..." (Back in our day...) in a highly patronizing tone. Here's why:
1. I've seen black and white TVs
2. I was born in a time without cable and one, yes one, government run terrestrial TV channel.
3. I can recognise the tune All India Radio plays when it opens broadcast every morning.
4. I know what Krishi Darshan is (if you don't, don't ask).
5. I don't understand the chat lingo kids use these days. Chatting with my cousin on MSN makes me feel inadequate. I'm old skool. I first conversed online on a quaint thing called IRC. LOL sure! LHO?? What the f***?
6. I've owned and used a Unix shell account.
7. I used to run a moderately popular Bulletin Board System. No, not an online forum! You could dial into it using your modem and surf (if you can call it that) in colorful ASCII. Yay!
8. On that note, I know what Legend of the Red Dragon is.
9. I played GTA and GTA2. Yes, that's right, they're top down and 2D and free. You got a problem with that, punk?
10. I was born before the Internet.
11. Until I was 12 years old, you'd have to wait anything between a year to your whole life to get a phone connection (yes, a landline). Thank you MTNL.
12. I was born before cellphones.
13. I was brought up with the notion (and given theory to prove) that the most a telephone line could do was 33.6kbps. If your provider was nice, maybe you could get 56kbps sometimes. DSL?? ADSL?? Hogwash!
14. At various times in my life, I have owned an Atari 2600, Atari 5200, the original 8-bit Nintendo, the 16-bit Nintendo and a Gameboy. The only one I still have track of is my super nintendo. And yes, Contra still rocks my world. Bring on the 30 lives!!
15. I've used an 8088-based PC and a BBC micro.
16. I know GWBasic and QBasic (hate both).
17. I can write an application using C++ and Windows API, in Windows 3.11, on a computer with 2MB of RAM, and a 33Mhz processor.
18. I've seen Visual Basic 1.0. The DOS version. Don't believe me? Translate this Einstein!
19. I can tell you the speed of a modem by listening to its handshake. No really, I can! And I know other people who can. Sad. I know. Not if you've spent 20 calls and 40 minnutes trying to get connected.
20. I know what .mod and .s3m files are.

Birthdate: 03/09/80

Can't think of anymore right now, but feel free to add to the list. I know I will. Also old:
http://anupma.livejournal.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/serioussam/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pun23/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anand/