Dr Mosi's Kraal

News and not news

2008-09-11T03:24:00.010Z

Jose told me the other day that Zambia was hardly ever in the news compared to our more illustrious neighbours such as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (ex Zaire). A quick look at the bbc africa page shows the words used in news articles on Africa most - least frequently (large font - small font):

(stats generated by wordle)

That's pretty interesting. Fighting and violence fairly prominent... dictators such as Mugabe being very popular. So bad, bad, bad bad...

Here's a similar analysis of the BBC Europe page:

(stats generated by wordle)

Again lots of fighting and wars and such. Nothing about the progress we're making with the large haldron collider coming alive and functioning like the scientists said. And the world NOT ending like the religious people said. Will this be the end of eschatology (aka religious ideas about the end of the world ?) - ever notice how similar eschatology is to scatology {study of #2 err crap err shit, or as GingaBoo would call it, poo (ok they would call it perfume)}?.

So then to get away from the mainstream media and their ideas that only bad things will sell, I went to Good News India, which reports positive stories. Unfortunately I couldn't find an RSS feed for their main articles. I found one for the project the webmaster is involved in currently, about going back to nature and such, so here's wordle's analysis of his articles in a happy white background :)

(stats generated by wordle)

Now that's more like it... farmers, solar, energy, power, windmill. More like the things I want to see in the news. (And you can't fault me for making this look happier than the other two - well, maybe you can - and then we can have a long fight about how marketing makes things more saleable).

So, mainstream media (Sorry I picked on the Beeb here), (and I know you're listening, the last couple of times I wrote about you here and here, there were hits from your domain,) pretty please, have 'positivity day' where a majority of the news is positive. The stuff that you don't consider news right now. For example, the President of Zambia died and there were no riots. Nobody got killed. No coup. Economy still going strong, growing about 5% per year. The funeral and mourning period went on well with minimum disruption to normal life. Lots of poor people can afford HIV treatment thanks to PEPFAR and CIDRZ. So... stuff like that, you know ? So that the rest of the world doesn't think that we live on trees and shoot each other. Thanks.

Indian Idol

2007-06-20T00:57:00.000Z

Season 3 of Indian Idol is running - I happened to catch the wild card round - and before you ask - "if I tell you how I'll have to kill you." OK the videos are online at the official site here.

11 people had already gone through to the finals. 18 people had been voted off. Out of the 18 who had been voted off, the judges picked 6 of the best and brought them back to compete against each other. The audience would get to pick 2 out of these to join the 11 in the finals. The first thing I noticed...

...was that these two are actually not gay. It's absolutely fine for heterosexual men in most parts of India to hold hands, hug, put a hand of the thigh of the other and nobody will think twice about it. Same applies to girls. As long as it's platonic everyone is OK with it. The only problem is that they assume that all male-female contact is non-platonic. That's a fairly silly restriction I think, but then again I keep complaining about people mistaking Victorian England traditions for ancient Indian traditions.

The judges are Javed Akhtar, a famous lyricist / writer, Alisha Chinai, who's probably the Paula Abdul equivalent, and Udit Narayan, a famous film singer. Javed Akhtar is the most Simon-like but he's not as direct as Simon, he'll still use the formal version of the language while talking to the contestants. Udit Narayan seems to want to vote no one off and loves everyone.

The standard of singing was really high. Singing looks like it can be outsourced too, compared to what I've seen on American Idol. And these were the people who didn't make it, they're as good as the top 5 of the American Idol thing. This guy was my favourite as a rock singer, his name is Amit Paul:

Suhit can hold a tune, but his voice sucks compared to the left and he doesn't seem talented. However he's getting by on good looks. I think he's the Malaker of the competition. Alisha is completely bowled over by him and it didn't seem all platonic either.

So after his singing Udit Narayan and Alisha Chinai praised him to the heavens and Javed Akhtar tried to avoid the issue by saying that he respected the opinions of the other judges. He tore Suhit a new one when pressed on the issue (all the time using the extremely polite version of the language):

Alisha: he has a lot of magic, a lot of colour
Javed A: i think that despite all your style and magic ultimately there should be no deficiency in your singing.
As long as your singing is bad, everything else is fringe benefits.
it's like a car, it might have good seats, a dvd player, even a television but if it doesn't run then it is not a car, it is something else.

Now I'm waiting to know who continued into the finals.

One of the guys who's already in the finals is an Indian guy of Chinese origin called Meiyang Chang. He has a blog and sings pretty well. I must say it's nice to hear somebody who looks Chinese speaking /singing in perfect hindi.

Sony's being extremely sucky on the show by pimping sony ericsson phones. There's a cardboard phone right by the judges and the host keeps exhorting people to sms using their sony ericsson phone and the camera focuses in on the phone in her hand. It makes me want to never get a sony ericsson phone.

Le Roi Indien

2007-03-03T16:15:00.000Z

We were all happy that the French football team was made up of people whose ancestors migrated from other countries in the last couple hundred years. And now, if France decides that they want a King to compete with the English queen, here is the man for them:

(from Taipei Times)

A relative of the Bourbons left France 400 years ago, travelled around the world, and eventually made his fortune in India. The picture shows his descendent, Balthazar-Napoleon Bourbon, who is the oldest of the living Bourbons. Although he doesn't speak French, his children are learning it. (Summarised from here and here).

I think the French government has been secretly planning to break the news that they have decided to re-establish the monarchy. France cannot be seen as backward compared to the hated Roast Beef, the English. Witness the popularity of Pascale de Bollywood, Vikash Dhorasoo's inclusion in the football team for the World Cup, and Amitabh Bachchan's winning of the French Legion d'Honneur. François Gautier appears to care more about India than most Indians from his writings, so he definitely has realized the ambitions of the French government.

I can just imagine that in the future, Pascale de Bollywood would be hired to sing at Balthazar-Napoleon's coronation, and Vikash Dhorasoo will be a shoe-in for the national football team. Wait a minute... by royal order football will be scrapped in favour of cricket, some song and dance sequences will be added to movies such as Amelie, and Amitabh Bachchan will become an honorary French citizen, where he can romance 18 year old girls in real life by royal decree as well as in the movies. François Gautier will be the royal messenger. The only question that remains is, should France be incorporated as a state into the Union Territory of Pondicherry or be under the Goans?

Christans, convert back to Judaism

2007-02-27T23:06:00.000Z

Sorry Christians, the writing is now on the wall. I anticipate a massive conversion of Christians to Judaism, starting with the Pope himself. All former Christian majority countries should now consider themselves provinces of Israel.

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, James Cameron has made a documentary about some 2000 year old stone caskets containing the remains of a family:

Mary; Matthew; Jesua son of Joseph; Mary; Jofa (Joseph, Jesus' brother); and Judah son of Jesua.

Cameron thinks that these names suggest that this was the historical Jesus who is mentioned in the Bible. Lots of people are very upset about this 'blasphemy' as it suggests that Jesus was in fact not divine. He was just a guy who wanted everybody to be nice to each other and maybe invoked the name of an imaginary superior being to bolster his case.

It's a good idea, this guy apparently lived the ideal and showed that it could be done by people. Who cares if he had a family like 100% of the other people his age in that time period and got buried? Just shows that he wasn't a complete weirdo. Hey, what next? Maybe they'll find that Jesus was Arab... probably related to Arafat or Hussein of Jordan or something. If Christians really care more about Jesus's divinity rather than what he said and did, then they have their priorities wrong.

If these do turn out to be the bones of Jesus and family then the sceptics are showing massive disrespect. Lightning will strike them down etc. Well, either way us neutral atheist/agnostic/non-Christians are in for an entertaining time. Wonder if the Bible will need a disclaimer in front of it, "This is a work of fiction..." Oh wait, it's been done already.

The state within

2007-02-25T03:43:00.000Z

Internement of UK citizens in Virginia, evidence suggesting the secretary of state of the USA collaborated with corporate elements to start a war in a -stan country, gay men kissing, lots of death, general mayhem, and a morally bankrupt leadership. A wag the dog style indictment of the US administration. And, did I mention Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) is the main character?

The acting in this BBC series is brilliant, the writers did not have to be very imaginative because the material is ready-made. Anybody who's been following geopolitics will understand the references... so it's a great watch. US citizens of a right-wing mentality may be very angry at the show, but I think it is useful for Americans to see how the rest of the world perceives the driving force behind US foriegn policy.

Americans are taught that their nation stands for freedom, free thought, free expression, and democracy. They are also taught that their country tries to promote these values in foriegn lands. Several actions the US government has taken does not add up to these values:

1. Coup that removed Patrice Lumumba from power in Zaire in the 60s. Led to Mobutu Sese Seko taking dictatorial control and the assasination of Lumumba.

2. Overthrow of Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran in the 50s. This lead to dictatorship of Reza Shah Pahlavi. He could not find any support among the population and was overthrown. The Iranians blamed the US government for Reza Shah, leading to the hostage crisis.

3. Support to various Pakistani dictators. The USA sold weapons to Pakistan in the 60s which led them to start a war against India in 1965. They also had help from the Joradian air force in that war, again using US weapons. In 1971, using US weapons again, the Pakistani army massacred about 3 million civilians in Bangladesh. India tried to help the Bangladeshis while the US sent an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India.

4. Saddam and Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

I'm sure there are other things I'm missing. So the credibility of the USA to export democratic values has been tarnished by the USA itself. Now, I'm not saying that any other country would have behaved any differently in the same position. Bloody hell, I'm not even saying that I would have done anything else if faced with the ability to make those decisions. I'm just saying that the blinkers US citizens have about their government should maybe... be taken off. It's only what citizens should expect from a democracy.

Karamchand Sir, you are a genius

2007-02-11T22:26:00.000Z

In the beginning, there was Karamchand. It was the first detective series I remember watching in India on DD, the sole national TV station of that era. Now, there are new episodes of Karamchand following an almost 20 year hiatus. The series Monk is similar in concept. It's about an eccentric detective and his secretary who solve crimes using fairly old-fashioned methods. None of this zooming in on DNA trapped on carpets or blacklights or evidence collected from the rear end of a stinky llama in Tibet. Just interviews of possible suspects, a keen eye for their behaviour, and an uncanny ability to puzzle out the mystery logically.

Sherlock Holmes could not have been happier, although his logic was fallible... especially in one case where he determined that the murderer was highly educated because of the gigantic volume of his head (there's 5 points I lost on a test because I had read the book and nobody else had, including the teacher who assigned us the whodunnit to solve logically. I left my brains at home and relied on memory. Should have remembered that my future career was science and not medicine and desisted. Sir Arthur, I will never forgive you for that).

Karamchand's eccentricities include stating the obvious and saying out loud what the other person is thinking in a rapid pace without any punctuation to mark sentence boundaries. In an ingenious vegetarianised nod to Jeeves, the genius butler of Wodehouse fame, he munches on carrots instead of the fish that Jeeves preferred. He also seems to order around A Khan, the hapless police inspector who's actually in charge of the case and who just has a first initial, no name. Just a random Khan.

The plot of the latest episode was good, and no obvious inconsistencies I could find, and the viewers got all the clues necessary to solve the case before K does. Brilliant. There's a little part where they try to make humour out of the Bengali language, but I didn't get the jokes. They kept the original actor, Pankaj Kapur, as Karamchand but unfortunately, as directors are wont to do, upgraded to a younger model in the secretary Kitty. I quite liked Sushmita Mukherjee in the original and wish that in a nod to the 21st century, she would have taken on the lead detective role with perhaps advise from a retired Karamchand. Sucheta Khanna performs the bimboesque role adequately.

Until the next time K airs, remember to shut up, Kitty, and chew on your carrots.

M reminded me to put in that the music has not changed since the 80s, and the opening credits are in a similar style too.

Tag: karamchand

How to save a life

2007-01-13T01:59:00.000Z

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend, somewhere along in the bitterness and I could have stayed up…

Well as you have probably guessed by now, thanks to the promptness of Lova in getting tickets the day they were released, I attended the sold out “The Fray” concert. And by sold out I mean a few hours after the tickets were available… 6000, gone, just like that.

The opening band was called Mute Math (does anyone know why mathematics is abbreviated ‘Math’ in the USA and ‘Maths’ everywhere else?) They started off well, I particularly remember a song called Control. Then they lost their way a little, with the lead singer jumping on top of the instrument he was playing and doing handstands and so on. Based on the music, I would guess that their influences are Sting, Oasis and Ross Geller. They’re not as ‘ahead of their time’ as Ross Geller was, maybe it’s a transition between what most people would call music and whatever Ross did on Friends. The good thing about Mute Math is that each member seemed to be proficient at playing all the instruments. They did have a fear of picking up after themselves, so they hired a technician to run around stage putting drumsticks and microphones back where they belonged from the floor and behind the stage. At the end the technician got a big hug from the lead singer and a cheer from the audience so he probably felt appreciated.

After an interminable wait between the opening band (foreplay band as the Doc calls them) The Fray started playing. Their attempts to get the crowd involved with Over my head (cable car) failed when the Purdue public did not quite share their memory of the lyrics. Ah well, they recovered and went back to the music. The Purdue audience got an exclusive look at a brand new song, which they wrote 3 hours before the show and performed for the first time. It’s about the rhythm guitarist’s brother who had a bad year last year. Wait... maybe the brother was the technician who had to pick up after the foreplay band. The acoustics at Elliott Hall are not the greatest so we couldn’t hear the words or the lyrics to this song properly. (The guitarist himself had a cheat sheet which he put on the floor and referred to throughout the song). The lead singer has a great voice I must say and he came on stage with just an acoustic guitar to sing one song. That’s some of the best singing I’ve ever heard at a pop / rock concert.

They finished off with the only Fray song I know the lyrics to (and it's very difficult to play on guitar) - How to save a life - and left everyone very happy. It was a little ironic that Grey’s anatomy’s first episode was skipped by all the people at the concert to watch a band that the show made popular. The only negative thing was that all of their songs sounded very similar. I think they should have changed one of the more popular songs to a reggae beat or so to make it seem less like the monotonic Indian left arm pace battery of last year (Sorry, had to throw in a cricket allusion.)

We tried to get closer to the action by using binoculars but unfortunately we did not succeed:

Interestingly the audience seemed to be about 70% women. This was great for Lova and me until we started making the calculations and figured out that the average audience member was born in 1989. We almost felt bad taking in the pulchritude on display… but not that bad.

Barack Hussein Obama, the bell tolls for thee

2006-12-30T05:26:00.000Z

Update 1 Feb 2007: The extremely funny Melvin Durai made some suggestions for this post. You can read his take on Obama here. So I'm changing the post based on his suggestions (*).

I’m sure there are good reasons to elect Obama. However, going by the advertisements of candidates in prior elections, superficial reasons are more important. So, here are the best superficial reasons why Obama should be elected as President of the United States of America in 2008:

10. He hasn’t been in office long enough to be on the board of Halliburton. Everybody should have the opportunity to be on the board of Halliburton.

9. He’s so popular in Kenya that Kenya could become the 53rd state (after Puerto Rico and the UK).

8. No other would-be President has supported good manners. Joe Biden could sure learn some good manners.

7. He’s a great guy to have representing USA. His dad’s Kenyan, mom from Kansas, second dad Indonesian, half-sisters Indonesian, dog's German shepherd, cat's Persian, he has the whole UN in his family.*

6. Anybody who does a video about the double meanings of supporting a football team and announcing his entry into the presidential race deserves to win that race. (Go Colts, sorry Obama.)

5. For the bigoted who will not vote for African-Americans – he’s not really African-American. His dad was Kenyan and his mom is from Kansas.

4. Obama was on Oprah. She was impressed. Bush was on Oprah. She was depressed.*

3. His middle name is Hussein. His last name is similar to Osama. Get a president who has the names of your worst enemies. Battle for hearts and minds on Arab Street, anyone?

2. Grace (of Will and Grace fame) had a dream where Obama was in her shower and “Ba-racking her world.”

1. He looks like Nelson Mandela. He didn't spend time in prison, but he did suffer through Harvard.*

Who's the man?

2006-12-27T21:33:00.000Z

Not me, certainly:

Here are some of my results. How about you?
(Take the test here)

Angles
This task tested your ability to identify the angle of a line by matching it with its twin. This is a spatial task, which looks at how you picture space.
Your score: 16 out of 20
Average score for men: 15.1 out of 20
Average score for women: 13.3 out of 20

If you scored 13 - 17: You found this test neither hard nor easy. This suggests your brain has male and female traits when it comes to spatial ability.

Spot the difference
This task tested your ability to identify which objects changed position. You lost points, if you incorrectly identified objects.
Your score: 43%
Average score for men: 39%
Average score for women: 46%
If you scored between 34 - 66%: You may have a balanced female-male brain.

Systemising
Your systemising score is: 17 out of 20
Average score for men: 12.5 out of 20
Average score for women: 8.0 out of 20

Systemisers prefer to investigate how systems work. A system can be a road map, flat pack furniture, or a mathematical equation – anything that follows a set of rules. A score of 15 and above suggests you're good at analysing or building systems. Men in general are better at systemising.

Eyes
This task tested your ability to judge people's emotions.
Your score: 8 out of 10
Average score for men: 6.6 out of 10
Average score for women: 6.6 out of 10
If you scored 7 - 10: Your result suggests you are a good empathiser, sensitive to other people's emotions. Women generally fall into this category.

I think the test is false! I am much more of a caveman than this indicates. Does the BBC not peruse my posts about attractive women and video games?

Being 10 again

2006-12-24T17:18:00.000Z

Recently Lova and I have been rediscovering our largely misspent childhood / adolescence. (The local opinion around here, and to our faces, not just backstabbing, is that we never left adolescence.) Anyway I chanced upon the “adult swim” channel which was telecasting the cartoon Voltron, a staple of my childhood. I immediately clicked the DVR option to make a series recording. For the uninitiated, Voltron is a cartoon about a robot, the defender of the universe.

The premise is simple, there’s an evil king Zarkon who destroys planets and takes the population as slaves. He has a son, Lotor, who plans to be even more evil than the dad. Lotor is in love with Princess Allura and true to his demonic nature, wants to lay waste to her planet, make all the people slaves and take the princess as his wife. The Princess and four other space explorers pilot 5 robotic lions who can combine to form the mighty robot Voltron.

Every episode has the same story. Lotor trains “robeasts” as opposed to robots to try to deactivate Voltron. He also plots to separate the voltron force so that they cannot form Voltron. Initially he succeeds and his Robeast only faces 4 lions and beats them up.

Then the fifth lion shows up and they form Voltron. Voltron fights a little, gets beaten, eventually decides to “form blazing sword.”

That’s it for the Robeast… one swipe of the blazing sword kills the Robeast, Lotor goes back to plot a new way of separating the force and training new robeasts. Of course the Voltron force could save themselves a lot of trouble by destroying Lotor’s home planet, which they never do. They also should just form Voltron immediately and have the blazing sword all the time. Then every episode would only last 10 minutes (5 minutes for beginning and ending scene, 3 minutes for the scene that forms Voltron, and 2 minutes for the explosions when the robeast dies.) This is probably why I do not write this series, but it's a classic and I love my Voltron.

Lova and I also acquired a used Xbox and currently we are fulfilling a 3 year dream of playing the game Dead or Alive: Xtreme beach volleyball. The plot of this game is brilliant. The female characters of dead or alive (a fighting game) are invited to an island, ostensibly for a martial arts contest, but in reality there is no contest. So they decide to take off their fighting clothes and don bikinis and play volleyball against each other.

This is one game where watching is as much fun as playing! And don’t worry, it’s not all about volleyball, the girls have to form relationships with each other based on gift giving and going to the bathroom together and whatever else ladies do to bond. This allows them access to better volleyball partners. Better partners mean more victories, which means more money to buy more bikinis. Again, the scriptwriter of this game should be awarded a Nobel or something. (Opponents of the game do say that it's against women, but those are the same sort of opponents who believe that women should be pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen for all time so I don't lend their opinions much credence. And anyway, the volleyball scene in Top Gun did not draw any opposition from these groups so they are being hypocritical.)

Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy new year, happy holidays, and may the gentlemen who visit the blog play beach volleyball with the xtreme crew and may the ladies play with Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and cohorts (or the other way round if they prefer).