Too many things happening all at the same time.

The high points:

1) My keyboard is fixed. Nearly. Yippee. Now I can safely go back to ignoring it in peace.

2) Finished off a Conan novel – “Conan The Magnificent”. Still have to complete “Conan The Triumphant”, “Conan The Destroyer” and “Conan The Indestructible”. Yeah, yeah, that’s actual names of novels I am talking about….

3) Mr and Mrs Iyer. Thank you, Mrs Aparna Sen, for renewing my faith in Indian cinema. Thank you, Mr Zakir Hussain for making me buy one more cd.

4) Rhydhun, by Taufiq Qureshi is so, so, SO brilliant. Thank you, psasi, for lending it to me for such a long time. Wish you would never ask for it back, but of course you will, so I am gonna copy it anyway.

5) Best Book Stall. The place that never lets me down. Anybody wants a copy of Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” for 80 bucks? What about a first edition of RK Narayan’s “A Tiger For Malgudi” for Rs 75? A hardcover sixteenth printing of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for 200 Rs? These are the stuff I didn’t buy because I already have them…..imagine the stuff I actually bought. >:-)

6) Spy Kids 2. Red Dragon. Explosions. Yippeeee!!!

The low points:
1) Discovered on Sunday that I have this major caffeine addiction. There was this timpani beating in my head that refused to stop until I had two cups of coffee….

2) Brand Equity. The deadline ticks closer. And I still hate Business/Corporate quizzes….

3) The load-balancer code. Over the past couple of days, I have encountered everything from NumberFormatExceptions to NullPointerExceptions, and it’s only the first 90 lines of code, goddamnit!!!!!

4) Livejournal – This happened n times, where n is a positive integer tending to …well, not infinity, but a very high number anyhow.
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
——————————————————————————–
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.livejournal.com/~beatzo/friends
The following error was encountered:
Connection Failed
The system returned:
(110) Connection timed out
The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

5) The Filmfare Awards. Morons, you give ARR the best Composer award and conveniently forget Sadhna Sargam’s ethereal “Chupke Se”. You make India’s biggest ham the compere and forget to switch off the mic when he opens his mouth. You take the cowards’ way out and give both Kavitha and Shreya the same award and on top of it, you don’t let them speak a word on stage. You actually think Vivek Oberoi in Company was better than Amitabh Bachhan in Aankhein or Jackie Shroff in Devdas!!!!! And to think I respected your magazine!!!!
Actually, I still do, but I don’t trust your powers of judgement. (yeah, as if that matters, right? )

6) Spy Kids 2. Red Dragon. Explosive Trash, but Trash all the same. Not that I mind.

5 more days left for the next weekend.

Jeez.
I have tonnes of unread books at home. Loads of albums I haven’t listened to properly, music videos I haven’t seen. Hajaar literary ideas floating around in my head. A dozen or so computer-games I haven’t started yet. “Cult” movies I bought/wrote, but haven’t seen yet. Lots and lots and lots of printouts to peruse.

And as always, I wonder what I am going to do over the weekend.

Whaaaaaaaaam!!!

That was last night in a nutshell.

***Excerpt from a couple of book reviews found here***
DREAM COUNTRY –
I urge you to do two things: read all of the SANDMAN books; and read them in order. You must do the first because these books are great literature and great literature will affect you. I urge you to do the second because though each volume is complete in itself, the series is one epic tale. You wouldn’t read War and Peace starting at page 168, would you? Approach SANDMAN in the same manner, begin at the beginning and end… well, at the end. If however, by some strange twist of fate, you should find yourself with DREAM COUNTRY in your trembling palms, begging your attention and you haven’t yet had the pleasure of the first two volumes, you have dispensation to read it.

A GAME OF YOU –
Alice in Wonderland meets Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Wizard of Oz, as directed by Joseph Campbell, A GAME OF YOU is what your favorite bedtime story grew up to be.

:-D
Major Sandman resources on the ‘Net :

The definitive Neil Gaiman page
Annotations to the comics
Dave McKean’s Artwork

Neil Gaiman is this awesome writer I fell in love with once upon a time….he was one of the guys who made comics part of the literary mainstream, with the epic Sandman series…went on to hunt out other Gaiman works, his novels “American Gods”, “Stardust” and “Neverwhere” among others, articles and idiosyncratic collaborations ( note to 2fargon and psasidhar and everybody else into H2G2, Gaiman wrote the unofficial guide to the series, called Don’t Panic.
This little gem was something I discovered in “The Mammoth book of Vampires”….a fitting end to the collection.

Vampire Sestina

I wait here at the boundaries of dream,
all shadow-wrapped. The dark air tastes of night,
so cold and crisp, and I wait for my love.
The moon has bleached the color from her stone.
She’ll come, and then we’ll stalk this pretty world
alive to darkness and the tang of blood.

It is a lonely game, the quest for blood,
but still, a body’s got the right to dream
and I’d not give it up for all the world.
The moon has leeched the darkness from the night.
I stand in shadows, staring at her stone:
Undead, my lover . . . O, undead my love?

I dreamt you while I slept today and love
meant more to me than life — meant more than blood.
The sunlight sought me, deep beneath my stone,
more dead than any corpse but still a-dream
until I woke as vapor into night
and sunset forced me out into the world.

For many centuries I’ve walked the world
dispensing something that resembled love —
a stolen kiss, then back into the night
contented by the life and by the blood.
And come the morning I was just a dream,
cold body chilling underneath a stone.

I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone
to leave you prey to time and to the world?
I offered you a truth beyond your dreams
while all you had to offer was your love.
I told you not to worry and that blood
tastes sweeter on the wing and late at night.

Sometimes my lovers rise to walk the night . . .
Sometimes they lie, cold corpse beneath a stone,
and never know the joys of bed and blood,
of walking through the shadows of the world;
instead they rot to maggots. O my love
they whispered you had risen, in my dream.

I’ve waited by your stone for half the night
but you won’t leave your dream to hunt for blood.
Good night, my love. I offered you the world.

Umm, yeah, lest I forget….this one is dedicated to YOU. :-)