Question: Which Organisation’s headquarters are located at 12 Grimmauld Place?
Answer: The Order of The Phoenix.

Question: What do you call a self-proclaimed Potter-fan and Quizzer who has no clue about the answer to the above question?
Answer: A Moron of the First Order?

Close, but not quite.

Anyways, didn’t make it. The cut-off in the prelims was 21, and we made 20, which was the same thing that happened in the Odyssey quiz last January, so things are constant, and it’s ok, I don’t mind.

The good things:
1) Four of us had gone together. Three of us were a team, the fourth guy, Bhargava was supposed to meet Anil and Dhaaji there. Well, Anil got late and Dhaaji being Dhaaji was M.I.A. Leaving Bhargava to search for a team. he found one, and made it to the finals, and won the Third Prize. Cool, eh?

2) Aaaah. The Quiz. Brilliant questions in the finals. Really interesting, no obscure fundae and no chestnuts either. A healthy mixture. ( Or maybe I say so because I knew most of the answers. No, really.)

3) Landmark. The bookshops. “Ooooooooooh” and “Aaaaaaaaaah” are some of the words that come to mind. Man, the comics collection was amazing!!! I found 15 Spawn comics !!! Spawn comics!!! Wheee! Old Spiderman comics, the McFarlane/Larsen ones. Some X-Force, X-Men, Youngblood issues – dating back to those times when free Trading cards and double gatefold covers were “hot” items.

To think, once upon a time, I lusted after those stuff like crazy. Never thought I would get them in India. Especially Spawn. Once I paid a friend 800 rupees to get me 5 copies through his uncle in the States. And now I got 15 issues, including issue#2, 12, 16, 21-30 for twenty rupees each. Am I lucky or what?

Also got the O Brother Where Art Thou OST cd in the same place. And a rarity ( IMHO) called Music For an Arabian Night by Ron Goodwin and his Orchestra. This was one of the earliest examples of “world music” I had heard once upon a time, as a kid, on my uncle’s Gramaphone player, and later, borrowed the cassette from some friend. I remember being awestruck by the music then, it seemed so Oriental, so ethnic and mysterious. Right now, the same appeal isn’t there, but some of the tunes had stuck in my head, and it was nice reliving them, in a way.

4) Bought two ARR cds Keezhaku Cheemaiyile/Karuthamma and Vandicholai Chinrasu. The Aaraaro song from Karuthamma was included in the first cd. Thus, my ARR collection edges closer to completion.

The Bad stuff:
1) Chennai was hot! And I got the runs and a headache and a bad cold immediately after I reached that place. Aargh! Thank God the Music Academy had a nice, clean Men’s Room….
Er, I am pretty sure I didn’t screw up the quiz because of that.
Somebody suggested it might be dehydration. Oh! This is what dehydration is all about, eh?

2) Didn’t meet rulinian or madhuri567. Crowded hall and upset tummy were two contributing factors.

3) Times like this, I feel like I must apply for a credit card. The number of Trade Paperbacks I saw in Landmark was just awesome!!! They had everything from The Dark Knight Returns to all the Elseworlds Graphic novels and even hard to find books like James O’Barr’s The Crow ( the original black and white series), and I ran out of money. Aargh! There was a cool Crime Fiction section in Landmark which had all the Vachss titles. I was floored, really.

All in all, a good trip. Had loads of fun. Couple of more trips to Chennai are definitely on my agenda. I need to buy that luscious Green Arrow:Quiver hardcover I saw. And a couple of hundred more TPBS. :-P

I am going to Chennai for the weekend. Landmark Quiz on Friday. I dunno whether I will get tickets for a Boys show, but I can always hope. :-D See you there, rulinian and madhuri567. Also, fingers crossed about the Landmark comic-book sale.

My personal Gods for the week happen to be Vasu and contentedbloke. The former, for passing me 30 cds filled with goodies. ( Satriani videos, Metallica videos, BB King videos, Grateful Dead mp3s galore, Oh what oh what oh what oh what, Can beatzo ask for more? That’s the highest level of poetic intricacies my mind can handle, thank you. )

And just when I thought my cup had filleth for the week, contentedbloke‘s post for today brimmeth it over.

Deep bows go out to both of you. And of course, 23 free cds for Vasu.

Off to see KMG, and buy Wolverine:Origin. Life’s SO cool!

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….

Warning: Stay away from “Family Establishments”. Like newly opened IMAX Theaters. Instead of watching a movie you’ve been desperately waiting for, you would be involved in hearing family quarrels erupt on adjacent rows (“Why can’t you take care of your kids?” “No, why don’t you take care of YOUR kids first?” “You do it! No, YOU do it.”) or hear kids scream or puke popcorn all over seats and their fathers talking to their secretaries and attending to their polyphonic-ringtone waala cellphones. Also the occasional loud belching, followed by a complaint to their wives about “too much gas”.

Jeez. I wish I were the Hulk. Heh heh heh. You wouldn’t like me when I get angry, puny movie-goers.

Hmm, the Hulk, eh? Mandatory rant – When big-shot directors have grandiose dreams about “interpretation”, they shouldn’t massacre 30 years of history to satisfy their creative urge. Ang Lee could have easily made a movie called “Jekyll/Hyde 2003” instead of this. Maybe the only things that resemble the comic book are :- The Hulk is green. Bruce Banner has a girlfriend named Betty Ross, whose father is the Hulk’s nemesis. And the Hulk smash!

Gamma-irradiated French poodles? Two generations of mad Scientists? Pah!

Once the action begins, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Shrek’s elder bro hurling tanks or swatting bullets or cracking open sidewalks, Kristina Lokken would suffice, or even Neo, if you give him “guns! lots of guns!”.

Neil Gaiman has this to say about the Hulk movie, and that’s IT. All that I wanted to say.

The fact that a lot of the journalists complaining about The Hulk movie were complaining about all of the things Ang Lee had done where he thought he knew better. All of the things Sam Rami did right I felt like Ang Lee did wrong. In the Rami film [Spiderman] the first thing that happens is that he gets bitten by a spider. Yes! Then stuff happens and then he’s Spiderman. You go to a Hulk film, you know that two minutes into the film Bruce Banner needs to be trying to rescue this kid out on the Gamma-ray testing field, get caught by the Gamma-ray bomb, and turn into the Hulk. That’s what has to happen a few minutes in, and it doesn’t. You just get this interminable movie, and he doesn’t turn into the Hulk until halfway through; even then you’re going “Why did I get all that plot and what the Hell was that about?” The places where they change things are the places where things tend not to work. Having said that, I think the biggest reason comic books are so successful in Hollywood is that studio execs do not have imaginations, and they’re not very good at extrapolating. So if they have pictures, they’re sortof like storyboards, and they can see things without having to imagine too hard, so they get very happy.

I just got this good article written by Tim O’Reilly, (publisher, O’Reilly books) about Online Piracy, and why it isn’t at all that bad.

I had obtained it from the textz.gnutenberg site, which is itself a pirate site.

I ask myself “Am I a pirate?” or “Am I indulging in Software Piracy/Copyright infringement?” And I try to answer my own question.

Music first. I got into mp3s because of three things:

• I was getting tired of the sequential format of tapes. If I like a song, I would have to rewind to listen to it again, whereas with mp3s, I click to play again.
• A lot of new stuff that would have cost me a fortune to dabble in. Yeah, “dabble” is the right word. I could listen to a song I wanted, and if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to waste time ruing the fact that I spent 125 rupees for nothing.
• Quality consciousness came pretty late, but it crept in, all the same. I can no longer stand the irritating hiss in tapes, and sometimes ( that is now) even the flanging on certain 128-kbps encoded mp3s makes me cringe.

So fine, I have a huge stack of mp3s at my home, probably stuff I will never listen to in my life. ( Reba McIntyre? Gorefest? Children of Bodom? Naaaah! ) All neatly ( and in some cases, not so neatly) arranged in boxes and plastic cases and suchlike. I also copy cds, a lot of cds, mostly from my friends, because the stuff they usually buy is stuff that I need. In some cases, they get original cds from their friends, and I make copies for them, too.

I also buy cds from second-hand sources, and in grimy shops tucked away in dark corners for the sole reason that they are offering a substantial discount ( which can vary between 25% and 70% )

Does all the above make me a pirate? Should I choke with guilt everytime I see or read stuff about piracy? Will the RIAA sue me, someday?

That’s not all. My computer at home runs on an unlicensed version of Windows ’98. I also buy games, most or all of which are pirated. ( I think the only legitimate game I bought so far has been Baldur’s Gate, and that was at a 50% discount sale.) I have access to a lot of DivX movies, and copied VCDs, which I will get around to seeing, someday. The other day, I downloaded a demo version of Fruity Loops v3.56 for the sole reason that I already had a Crack to it, and I wanted to see if it works fine or not. It does, and I have it running at home. And about warez book sites, the less said, the better.

This might sound sick, but I don’t feel the least bit guilty about all this. The reasons?

• I also happen to be one of those compulsive CD-buyers. I mean, stuff I really, really want, I would never copy it, I would rather spend money to get it from some place. ( Of course, it’s much better when I can use a friend’s Music World discount card) For instance, if I find Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, or Peter Gabriel’s Passion, I would buy them Blindly, no thought. Except, of course, they shouldn’t be something more than the average market price.
• I have never, in my life, uploaded any stuff online. My stuff is mine, and my friends are free to take things they want, and I pass it on to them. Or at least make a copy. Not to faceless strangers, thank you. The Napster revolution passed me by, ( we RECians lived in a day and age when it was considered COOL when one could download a 600kb pdf without clicking “refresh” 8-9 times.) So I have never downloaded too much stuff either. The only album I downloaded was the Spiderman OST, and I got the cd as a gift three months later.
• Suppose I want to hear something real bad. One of those itches…like I have to listen to Meja’s All About the Money today or I will die. What do I do? First thing is, it would take me ages to find a cd on the market that contains the song, and secondly, will I really pay 350-525 rupees for one song?
• I wouldn’t get to hear all this good stuff, and appreciate them, if mp3s weren’t around. Nine Inch Nails in an Indian shop? Phish? The Bram Stoker’s Dracula OST? Where the heck do I get them?
• Games and software. OK, so when I was a college student, I simply wouldn’t be able to afford money for a Windows license. Now that I am working, why don’t I get one? Main thing – of course – is money. I would rather prefer a buggy cracked version of Win 98 than a licensed Win XP, because well, the only things that run on it are Winamp, Fruity Loops and games. Also, getting Linux Drivers for Creative Surround is difficult, basically I wouldn’t have the time to configure everything. Laziness, remember?

Ok, so maybe that was a lame excuse.

• Games are highly overpriced in India. Again, I wouldn’t know if I would like a particular game before I played it, and there aren’t any sampling booths out here.
• Books: I buy loads of them. All second-hand/discounted. The warez sites are for those that I want to try out, or stuff that I haven’t found, or books that are at home, and I want to refer to it sometimes. As to why I buy only second-hand books, I think it’s better for them to have a nice, caring owner rather than being picked up by some oddball who wanted to give it a “try”. Frankly, I think those kind of people should stick to Chicken-Soup books.

So. Am I a pirate? Even if I am, I am keeping all my stuff. And getting more. Please don’t let me get arrested, God.

Addendum: Read This, too.