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Loose ends

Well, I’m out of here. In case you didn’t figure that out already, after six-odd months of LJ silence. I might have posted again, but the sight of an 81-year old LK Advani with prime ministerly aspirations on the side-bar pissed me off big-time. Yes, you read that right – LK put me off LJ. As did the animated gifs that promised slimming tips and tyres that save 33 gallons in fuel over their lifetime.

The LJ stands as a nice record of the my life between 2002-2008 – most of it blathersome pap to the casual observer, but each post has a memory of its own for me. It will stay here, undeleted, as long as the company does not overhaul its database, or change its terms of service and wipe out all non-updated journals. There’s an official back-up of the archives if that happens – beatzo.wordpress.com, which I prefer because of the lack of annoying animated ads.

A slightly modified version of this ..umm…blog will continue here. Yup, own domain, wordpress installation, cheesy Japanese theme, OpenID support. Even a plugin that allows threaded comments. Upcoming 2009 Highlights : Watch me finally complete the complete study of the complete Lone Wolf and Cub Project. Marvel at the sincere reply to PR’s comment about the futility of watching onscreen violence. Dollops of verbose tub-thumping, animated monologues on the perils of being a collector, occasional reposts of my articles that have appeared in print here and there, acquisition-ahoy posts that warms the cockles of my shallow, materialistic heart and sentences that refuse to end.

And you folks on the f-list, the ones who still make me smile with your updates, the ones I look forward to seeing every other morning, I’ll be stalking reading you still.

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The Apatow-a-thon continues. Watched 17 episodes of Undeclared on Saturday. This series is a spiritual sequel of sorts to Freaks and Geeks; while the latter was about high school, this is about a bunch of freshmen in college. The “undeclared” term refers to the status of an undergrad student who has not decided on a choice of major subject. Ran on Fox in 2001 and, like all Fox series that I’ve come to love, was cancelled after the first season. Not because anything was wrong with the show; apparently, Fox telecast episodes in the wrong order, confusing viewers and bringing down ratings. Worst part is, even the DVD set has the episodes in wrong order; halfway through episode 10, we figured something goofy is going on, checked Wikipedia, and proceeded to rewatch the episodes in proper order. One of the high points of watching this was the number of surprise guest appearances by quite a few of the F&G cast as grown-up versions. Apatow-regular Seth Rogen is one of the leads ( and also writes some of the episodes), and Jason Segel has a recurring role. Both of them are a treat to watch, my only gripe being that Segel seems to have been typecast as the dumped boyfriend in almost all his major roles. Case in point: the Apatow movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I also watched over the weekend.

Wish-list updates: The third ( and final) volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo is out. As is the first volume of his seminal Blackjack, sixteen more to go. Amazon, ahoy!

And I see a solicitation for the second Omnibus edition of The Walking Dead, out 27th November. Ooh, yeah! Not buying the first volume of this omnibus is one of the greatest Comicbook mistakes I’ve made. Still trying to find a decent copy.

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