This is what I wrote to myself last night. I find that planning a weekend’s activities, or at least broadly outlining them in advance tends to make waking up on Saturday a very cheery activity.

Elfen Lied Episode 3-13
Stubbs The Zombie.
The Demon issues 16-58.
Reread The Man In The High Castle.

Ah, well. I started watching Elfen Lied because of the promising tone in one of vrikodhara‘s posts. The first fifteen minutes were a gorehound’s delight – a naked teenage girl silently walks through a prison leaving a trail of decapitated bodies of soldiers behind her. Bullets don’t strike her, and she does gruesome things with a pen (“plop” goes the eye) and even rips a pretty secretary’s head away from her body, and holds the torso up against the hail of bullets that ensues. How can one resist such a beginning, I ask you.

(One has to, however, when early-morning calls are scheduled.)

I finsihed Serious Sam: The First Encounter recently, and decided I had to play Stubbs the Zombie next. The game’s an anachronism of sorts, in that there is not really a set of objectives for you when the game begins, not even a storyline – other than the very basic “go-forth-and-chomp-on-brains” motivation. Yes, in Stubbs, you play as the zombie, and do rollicking things like throwing your head like a bowling ball at hordes of gun-toting humans, farting really bad gas to lay them low, lobbing clunks of faecal matter at them through a Sod-mobile, and of course, eating brains and creating your own zombie army. I am currently in the middle of the game, and having peed zombie piss all over a water reservoir, I am now being beset by scientists weilding antigravity guns and screaming “I will show you hard science!” at me. Fun.

The Demon issues, well, I got a 20-pounder package in the mail recently, thanks to th_gunslinger, who had held on to an eBay package for about a year and a half, and sent it off eight weeks ago. (Yes, dude, it got here fine, thanks so very much.) It contained a near-complete run of Hitman ( missing the last eight issues, gah! I am so desperate to own those!) and the complete run of The Demon, and a couple of miniseries like Ennis’s Fury and Daredevil:Ninja ( which I already had) I finished reading 15 issues on Friday morning, and have another 43 issues to complete. Alan Grant rocks! And I can’t wait to read the complete Ennis/McCrea run (this was the series where Hitman made his debut, by the way, so it seems fairly logical that a rereading of Hitman is in order after this one, heh heh)

I began reading Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle again, after I bought a second-hand copy of the book recently at Abids, for the grand price of 10 Rs. I had read it a couple of years ago as an e-Book, and it’s fantastic.

But yeah, most of my plans got waylaid today morning, when I got a call from Chandru in the office. Seems a package had arrived from secondspin.com. Which gave me a right tizzy, because I had ordered it just last Friday! Delivery within a week, how cooler can it get??

Lookee what I got!

One of my favourite words is “anthropomorphic”. Never mind that for a long time, I was mispronouncing it as “anthromorphic”, missing the “po” in the middle. The meaning of the word is to do with representation of an idea, or a concept, into human form. For example, all the Indian minor gods are essentially anthropomorphic representations of the natural phenomena they represent. Vayu, the wind, Agni, fire and so on. Or you might say that the members of The Endless, in Gaiman’s Sandman books are anthropomorphic representations of Dream, Death, Delirium, Destiny, Destruction, Desire and Despair. ( Woo-hoo, I didn’t have to pause while typing that!)

The reason why I bring this word up right now is that I have a vague feeling that the anthropomorphic representation of the term “stupid” would be….ME!

You see, I own a 128 MB USB drive, a small thingummijig that helps me transport data of minor import from home to office and vice versa. And because it’s so small, I am usually very careful about where it is kept, at any given point of time. Last night, I remembered that I hadn’t seen it in quite sometime, and proceeded to search through my stuff – the usual spots where I might have left it. Checked the drawer on my computer table, which is the kind of black hole that attracts Things That Disappear For Months. Nope. Checked the pockets of the shirts I had worn the last week. Nope. Checked the top parts of every shelf. Nope. Wallet. Nope. Top of CD player. Uh-huh.

This is the chain of thoughts that followed.
“Hmm, maybe it’s in your jeans pocket, you know.”
“Which jeans pocket?”
“Oh, the pair you were wearing last week, dum-dum.”
“Ahhhh, but that can’t be! I put it in the washing machine half an hour ago myself, and there was no USB drive in any of the pockets.”
“Well, half an hour ago, you weren’t thinking about USB drives, sonny. And you didn’t check any of the pockets, so there.”
“Oh shut up, I am pretty sure it’s not there. It should be there in my office drawer. Yes, I am pretty sure it would be in my office drawer. That‘s the other black hole, after all.
Hmmm.
*silence*
“Say….”
“Yes?”
“Didn’t you just go through your office drawer today morning, when you were looking for that printout?
“Grrrr, I did, but I wasn’t careful enough!! And NO, I am NOT looking in the pocket of my jeans. It’s been soaking there for half an hour and I am pretty sure it’s not inside any of the pockets and I am NOT putting my hand into soapy water.”
“Suit yourself.”

An hour later, when I was taking my clothes out of the washing machine and hanging them out to dry, there was a clatter, as the USB drive plopped out of the washed jeans. There was also a fifty-rupee note and a one-rupee coin among the other relics at the bottom of the washing machine. And the voice begins again, louder – “Stupidstupidstupidstupid” and the other voice whimpers and says “Ohmygodohmygodwillitworkornotohmygodohmygodishouldhavecheckedthepocketsdamnbotherandblastohmygod”.

Well, I let it dry throughout the night, just to make sure, and today morning, it worked. It worked! It’s still working! All the data still intact! Yes! YES! YESSSSS!!

Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid. Shut up. Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid.

The second instalment of Mahaquizzer, the Karnataka Quiz Association’s All-India Written Quiz is just two days away. I was in Bangalore the last year when it happened, and was made the coordinator of the Hyderabad segment of the quiz. The day of that quiz was one of the worst Sundays ever. there was some political rally going on, so all roads to Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, in King Koti were blocked by policemen. I could reach the venue myself only because I knew some of the gullies that led from Liberty circle. The turnout was pretty decent. But I cannot but help wondering if more people would have arrived had it not been for those road-blocks.

This year, the Hyderabad venue is St Francis College, just a stone’s throw away from my regular haunts. I used to stay very close to this esteemed ladies’ college two years ago, and the K-Circle would hold their monthly league quizzes in the classrooms of St Francis. One fine Sunday, it was found out that there was, of all things, a recruitment thingie going on, because of which we people weren’t allowed to enter the college. Instead of scuppering a well-made quiz, we ended up doing it in my flat. Yeah, it was a fairly big house, with a huge hall, and all of the participating members could squeeze in somehow and lounge on the somewhat-dusty floor answering questions. I remember the flat watchman getting rather nervous as a number of nattily dressed young (and middle-aged) people strolled into my house, with much enthusiasm – later he told me he thought I was about to be beaten up or something.

Well, I digress. Like I was saying, St Francis is hosting Mahaquizzer this year, and I hope participation is good. I won’t be here, though – I am supposed to be coordinating the Delhi chapter of the quiz, but bsing, I wish you all the best. I hope you buy a cellphone by the time you’re here, you lazy dog, because I’ve been taking calls from Delhi AND Hyderabad, pah.

And as for you quizzers/quiz-dabblers reading this, in case you’re wondering if it’s a good idea to wake up early on a Sunday morning and waste your beauty-sleep for some shady written test-thingie, here are a couple of words of advice. Because I am a coordinator, I’ve had a Sneak Preview of the question paper ( If you’re about to ask me a question, the answer is “No, I shan’t. You will see them on Sunday morning.”), and tried it out under stringent Mahaquizzer conditions. Well, I had more fun last year, when Arul had gotten all the coordinators together to Koshy’s and read out the questions one by one, and we had made a combined score that would have beaten the Mahaquizzer Maximum by quite a few points, heh. I attempted this last night, having taken a copy of the questions home from the office. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a print-out of the key, so had to come verify the answers and scores at the office. I scored quite average, let me assure you, about 44 or 45. I would give myself 45, as I didn’t write the name of a TV series when I was supposed to, inspite of going “A-HA! This is what it should be!”. The line that came to mind immediately after this was “Oh, bummer, but it can’t be this, can it?”, and yeah, I didn’t write it down. But still….)

It’s a brilliant quiz. I am not saying this because I know all of the people who set it and because two of them are on LJ ( take a bow, al_lude and kvk. The other two quizmasters are Dibyendu Das and Ochintya Sharma), but because, seriously, this quiz totally, totally made me sit and pull out my hair when I read the answers. NOT a bad thing. Every question I didn’t get made me feel like I should have gotten the answer, IF ONLY I had thought for ten seconds instead of dismissing it as something too obscure or obfuscated. This in itself makes it a perfect quiz in my opinion. A crib I had with last year’s instalment of Mahaquizzer was that some answers left me completely clueless even after knowing them, and that crib no longer applies this year. The weight given to various topics, at first glance, appears really balanced – I need to take a careful look at it later if I have the time, though, so don’t quote me on that. Some of the topical questions seem clustered on one page ( especially the Hindi movie questions on page 6, pah! )

Right. So if I have managed to pique your interest, here’s one more tip for you. When you have the paper with you, make sure READ the questions carefully. Don’t just hop, skip and jump around, go through them in order. Each of these questions have been framed really well, with just the correct amount of information that could trigger an answer from the depths of your tormented quiz-memories. Oh, tormented you will be, for sure. 150 questions in an hour and a half is no joke!