+ Puns and Stuff

Puns have been called the lowest form of humour. And someone added: "...and hence, the foundation of all humour." That addresses both sides of the argument adequately, and so I will let it be at that.

I do like puns; sometimes I love them. And, on occasion, I cringe from them. This latter form I usually find in newspapers – Indian English newspapers, I must specify.

I saw one in the papers today. Safin winning the Australian Open prompted this front-page headline: "Safin(e) a game". I don’t know what it means but I think I know what it is supposed to mean, and know very well that it is the sub trying desperately to be clever. This is trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, insisting that it is square, and fitting it with stuff to fill the gaps near the corners. Isn’t that what the ‘e’ in those brackets is doing?

For me, a good pun has to be straightforward, with its second meaning peeping out from behind the obvious one; not a convoluted and strained piece of wordplay which has pointers saying: "Hey! Look at me...I’m a pun." It’s no pun – I mean, fun – when you have something that looks like a mathematical equation, and you have to sit down and solve it - take apart the constituents and recombine them - before you can get at the second meaning.

Coming back to the Safin, let me hazard a guess. I think it has to be read to mean: "So fine a game." But since the brackets are there, let me again guess that it should be possible to read it without the paranthesis. But what does "Safin a game" mean? Laboured wit is no wit at all. It nearly ruins my day to open the paper in the morning and come across a bad puzzle like this right on the front page. Must you be clever at all costs? The only saving grace here for me is that it has nothing to do with a tragic event. Well, wordplay happened there, too. Read the end of Welcome to the Real World.

+ The Good Times

I called up my cousin the other day, and we started talking about music. He told me, "Hey, I’ve got a few more mp3 CDs of old live recordings." Then he excitedly listed some of the artistes, before going into realistic mode. "We keep recording all these concerts, but will we ever manage to listen to them? As it is, there is no time for it, and I can’t see things getting any better. I don’t think I’m going to be able to listen to all this stuff in my lifetime; and neither are you. The one comforting thought is that if anyone wants to listen to it all later, it is available."

This was probably the fourth time we had this conversation. And every time it’s the same. And, in spite of everything, every time there are new mp3 concert acquisitions to talk about.

The other day, I was chatting with another cousin, a movie buff, and we started discussing DVDs. I told him about an offer on a website where they were offering blank DVDs for the equivalent of less than 20 rupees. He was skeptical, but checked immediately and came across an even better online deal. The next step was to place an order and have his friend in the US bring it over on his trip here. Meanwhile, I was going to meet him, and he gave me a list of VCDs to take along so that he could write them.

It wasn’t long before realism raised its head. "We keep copying these movies thinking we will see them later, but I can see the list only growing," he messaged me. Yes, of course. In fact, now CDs are so cheap that we would be tempted to write anything above reasonable suspicion and place it in the shelf. Earlier, it was books, then mp3s, now it’s movies. Availability is up and costs are so far down, there is really no need to discriminate. We told each other: in fact, given a choice between watching an excellent movie and writing five good ones, there wouldn’t be too much hesitation in choosing writing the five. The to-be-watched collection at home can only keep growing.

As my uncle put it, books, music and movies are all means of entertainment, keeping oneself occupied. The only change that seems to be happening is that instead of reading, hearing or watching seems to be overtaken by acquiring. The enjoyment or thrill seems to come a step earlier – from the process of acquisition. I guess that’s the price of easy access.

But what’s the problem with that, if the goal is to have a good time?

+ Trysts with Nonsense

Everyone (well, almost) has had a butt-in with nonsense and gibberish when they were young. I did, too, from what I hear. But my real tryst with nonsense began when my brother and I, after flipping through a few issues of Mad and ridiculing everything in sight, found the crazy inspiration to actually try to put the blade, so to speak, to people’s throats. Thus was born, when we were still in school, Sawyer, with no pretensions of being the premier driver-up-the-wall of people. Just an outlet for our own few pet peeves and sense of the ridiculous.

No inkjet printers and no money meant that it was a handcrafted masterpiece, with just one copy in existence. Even that copy hasn’t existed for a few years now.

I still remember the booklet – handwritten and hand-drawn, 12 pages (or eight, I don’t remember right) of something larger than A6, and held together not with staples but with pins. There was a takeoff on Amitabh Bachchan’s dancing skills, one spoof of acne cream, a goodnatured jibe at the Horlicks ad about the kid who says he loves to eat it as it is. The rest of the contents, unfortunately, doesn’t linger anymore in memory.

Issue No 2 has absolutely no recall, but I remember that the effort was beginning to get to us. Just two kids trying to think up enough nonsense to fill at least eight pages – small pages admittedly, but all original content, no jokes picked out of magazines or people’s mouths.

Issue No 3 – that never happened. And Sawyer went into limbo early on, with a mutually agreed resolve to revive it as soon as we could. We are still waiting....

Meanwhile, nonsense found other outlets. In the beginning, my typewriter helped me rattle off whatever built up in my head in my insane moments. I remember one piece about it raining cats and dogs which unfortunately I seem to have lost. Then, there was a weird take-off on Picasso - again, irretrievably misplaced. On and off, the notes I shared with colleagues at an earlier workplace contained bits of inspired (or otherwise) nonsense.

Then, about a couple of years after that, I got an opportunity to get some of it in print. Nothing dazzling, but nothing to be ashamed of, either (I hope!). Here is one of them....

"Food and sleep, it is true, are the basics one needs to stay alive and stay sane. And it has for long been said, at least in the West, that counting sheep is the best way to get to sleep. In India, at least in the rural heartlands, grandmothers are wont to pin kids down to the bed, hold the eyelids down over the eyes and exhort the child to chant the name of Rama till the little one falls asleep. The operative part of both procedures is the utter monotony that eventually induces sleep.

"But coming back to counting sheep... actually, it is perhaps even the best way to get to sleep and also to fill your stomach. The important detail here is that you should not let monotony and boredom, and consequently sleep, overcome you. Or, you can forget the food. Start counting the sheep (the colour does not really matter, just be sure they are healthy) and visualise each one clearly before you count the next one. This will mean that each count will take not the half second it would have taken for thoughtless mortals; instead, it is likely to take a couple of minutes. Once you reach fifty sheep, stop and once again take your mind`s eye again over all those bleaters you visualised. Reach out your mind`s hand. Pick the juiciest, most succulent, most tender of the animals, and... Do you need to be told more? Have the feast of your life. This feast will also have the added advantage of making you even more sleepy. Go ahead; make your day."

+ Sarva's way... his own way!

Sarvananda was born some time in 1993-94. A little out of compulsion, a little out of desperation. At work, there were the four of us who used to work different shifts and exchange info through notes when our shifts didn't allow us to meet for a week or longer.

Pretty quickly, the notes became something of a routine, a ritual, and I was thinking of different things to write about when nothing obvious was available. Sarvananda was one of those incidental ideas, but has refused to go away. He crops up when I am searching my computer looking for files or going through my online file storage dumps, and I can't help the reacquaintance. Sometimes, when I am in the mood, I add a little more to Sarva's life - just a little.

I do feel a bit guilty. For someone who is more than 10 years old, Sarva has had unenviable growth, gaining just a couple of attributes. Sometimes, though, I am just glad that he still exists. He has possibilities, immense possibilities, as long as he just keeps breathing, because he can become just about anything. Much of what he could be can be imagined from past example, but the more exciting thing is that new material that could add to his personality keeps coming up continually.

Sarva is, and he will be. But how far he goes and how soon depends (see The Creative Impulse)

+ Open Windows...

Windows Update has just informed me that there is another chink in the armour of Windows that could allow the pernicious souls out there to execute codes remotely on my machine. I don’t understand these things too much but it seemed to say that this problem was part of the Help file. Hmmm.

Looking at the regularity with which holes are found in Windows (we don’t really know how many people get to know about them before Microsoft does), it seems more of a sieve than an armour. And how is it that every bit of software they make has gaping security holes that makes my computer a public utility? This is not just in the first versions, but in the supplementary ones too. In fact, it would be useful to assume that a security fix or patch itself has a bit of lazy coding that is the incubator for the next security hole.

Microsoft says this new threat is inherent in IE 6 Service Pack 1 and Win2000 Service Pack 3, among a lot of other versions of other software. I quite believe that. The only time you will not get a security alert from Microsoft about one of its products is when they stop supporting it. That’s when they also stop their efforts at trying to find out what more is wrong with their software.

That, however, doesn’t mean that Microsoft feels responsible for the problems in their software when they are still supporting it. No. Part of the EULA, which I am sure 99.99% of users don’t read a line of, says that Microsoft’s liability is restricted to $5 – even if your work suddenly came to a standstill because of this. So, I pay thousands for their software, things will go wrong, I will likely lose some peace and some time, and this is part of the initial understanding....

This cannot of course explain the large-scale piracy, but I can begin to understand why piracy may sometimes not be the evil thing it is. The estimate is that only about 30% of the Windows copies used around the world are legal – and I don’t think Microsoft deserves more than that.

+ Real Bad News

“As US Secretary of State Colin Powell could not help noticing, some of the countries affected were Muslim. That the US hiked its contribution despite this knowledge shows the extent of its forgiveness, Powell explained.” (The Mathematics of Giving, The Times of India, Sunday, January 09, 2005)

I really am not surprised, having questioned the US’s motives for long, but I must still admit to being furious. There isn’t an iota of honesty here, or the morality that the presidents of that country keep talking about. What has Muslim (or Eskimo, or cannibal, for that matter) got to do with giving humanitarian aid? But then, as we should know by now, that is how the “world’s greatest nation” stinks – I mean, thinks. This, coming from the one person in the administration who is widely reputed to have had half a conscience in the Iraq invasion; imagine the rest of the spooks!

If Muslim is a defining word in the Americans’ thought-and-action process that leads to giving or not giving aid, will somebody explain how Pakistan has been getting all those billions in cash and kind? Ah, and Saudi Arabia! Here, we are talking about a piddling $350 million from the US for tsunami relief, and sanctimonious crap on top of it. Well, by now most people (except those who are totally besotted with the glory of America) know, there is nothing that drives American action except strategic interests. They’ve spent $200 billion on Iraq, but then the oil will more than compensate when they have a nice shit-eating regime installed there. The tsunami concerns a few hundred thousand people who can do nothing for the US – hell, all put together, they can’t probably even buy a couple of fancy Fords coming out of Maraimalainagar.

I can kind of understand that, but that is not what makes the US a dangerous entity. It is that, combined with a breathtaking stupidity and a total lack of morality riding on their ultimate belief in their own power. Everything considered, it seems quite amazing that the American administration can’t see beyond the tip of its bright red nose. I can’t think of any country that has blundered so consistently for as long as the US has. Worse, they probably don’t think they need to take all that care – money, bombs and some simple arm-twisting can resolve almost anything. To top it all, the Bushman and the others of his ilk with blankets-worth of wool between their ears “know” that God is with the morally right people – meaning, these woolly-headed worthies. Well, to put it mildly, this God must be one deviant crazy.

One other aspect to the dangerousness: with a nation such as China, its people know it’s not worth betting on, but they can’t do anything about it; with the US, a lot of its people actually think the administration is working for the good of the world. And in case the loonies created by the US manage to get together enough to threaten the world, the moon (and probably, Mars) are getting ready for the US brains trust; meanwhile, you and I can enjoy our tsunamis.

+ Three cheers to PC-Man

Computer games these days are meant to knock you over, and your computer too. My cousin was telling me the other day about a new game – Doom 3, I think it was – that installs over a few GB on the hard disk and needs a 3 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM for decent play. Forget the piffling 128s on your that you might have on your antiquated P4 2.4s. So, what do you do? Go ahead and shell out a handsome few thousands for an upgrade or replacement so that you can have your ears explode and your mind reel from the energy of Doom 3 and its ilk that ship in 3-CD packs. Maintaining status quo is an uneasy choice because the ante is being constantly upped.

I don’t suffer from the angst, of course. I draw most of my sustenance from dear old dos games.

It was love at first sight with two of the all-time classics – PC-Man and Arkanoid. And it has ensured that I will never buy the latest PC to play a 3D game with 5.1 Dolby surround which requires that I become a monster with about 12 hands in order to go through the hundreds of keyboard commands fast enough to avoid an early gory end.

At my sometime amateur level, PC-Man is like chess, with its inexhaustible variety. Wonder how they managed to pack that kind of randomness and the seeming intelligence of the four monsters in less than 50kb.... I remember playing both these games on a 286 about a dozen years ago. And if I like that time the best, it is also because the speed of the machines allowed me to score pretty high. In fact, on faster machines I have not reached even two thirds the points or levels I did on those cute slowcoaches. It is only recently that I have started to get better results optimised by the tweaking of the wormily named SloMo.

PC-Man palled a little after I hit a peak of about 70,000 and when I realised that after level 8 or 10, you come all the way back to level 1, only this time it plays at relatively blinding speed. Of course, the level discovery was something I reached with some cheating. You don’t have highly developed cheat codes for diddly little games like this. So I had a geek friend look into the program code and tamper with the digits for the number of lives, which gave me unlimited lives. But it wasn’t a fraction of the fun as when you knew you had only three lives plus the ones you gained on the way. It’s the challenge of playing by the rules and winning that provides the thrill, not being able to be god.

Arkanoid, on the other hand, remains quite a challenge. The 286 helped me reach close to 190,000 points on the 18th level - after that, I haven't even reached six figures. And am I curious to know about the beyond!

Sure, I have a library of hundreds of games, but I still don’t play more than a dozen frequently. And half of them are dos games, including a couple of shoot-‘em-ups and a grand prix racing game.

Oh, I almost forgot. Another reason I keep going back to PC-Man is the music. Music’s never been cuter in the post-midi era.

+ The Creative Impulse

Every year gone by is another time, another opportunity, to look back and ruminate on what was and what could have been. Often, they are two sides of the same coin – it’s only when the coin comes to rest that you really know – and do you also get the feeling that both sides of the coin are the same?

So, here we are – another year, another grimace – as time and space shrink around us. It’s alarming.

I keep thinking of writing something – something substantial. Have never managed to write more than a few pages at a time. And, of course, there is never any getting back to it. There was a host of people who were in the same boat. Collaboration was the next idea – get together with a like-minded person moving along on inertia and write a book together. When was the last time that worked…?

After that, it was: “Hey, why don’t you keep writing something, doesn’t matter on what, and I’ll do the same, and let’s see if we can put it all together, tweak it a bit, and come out with something substantial?” [Smirk smirk!]

Then came the big online revolution. Suddenly, everyone was emailing (well, some of them) and instant-messaging each other. Idea No 3: When you are in the mood, chat with your would-be collaborator, archive all those chat transcripts, and at leisure cull the interesting stuff from it and weave a coagulator around it.

Hasn’t happened yet, but surely it isn’t time to smirk yet. This year, the chances look brighter than earlier. I have a lot many more transcripts. Now, I can really write that book, if only I can manage the time. (And don’t forget the inertia....)