zigzackly's omnium-gatherum *
Like you haven't had enough of us already..
Blogger profile,
older photographs,
Flickr album,
Picassa album,
Facebook profile,
Ryze page,
Orkut page,
LinkedIn page,
published articles.
Guest bloggers:
Hurree and Annie
Reactions, suggestions, any kind of feedback is always welcome.
CollaBlogs infested:
Jugalbandi;
Caferati's blog;
blogolepsy;
indi³;
We, the Media;
Son of CSF.
Now and then, when Hurree needs a holiday, i pinch-hit at Kitabkhana.
And of course, the wonderful World Wide Help group blogs, which include:
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog and TsunamiHelp Wiki |
MumbaiHelp |
Cloudburst Mumbai |
KatrinaHelp Blog and Wiki |
RitaHelp |
South Asia Quake Help |
Site feed: Atom or Feedburner.
We endorse, approve of, and throughly adore:
The Babu
Annie
Megha
Calvin and Hobbes
Frazz
The funniest page on the web
Luciferous Logolepsy
Wired
Google News
Books at the Guardian
Wikipedia
Hobson-Jobson
A.Word.A.Day
List of Bests
Word Spy
Literary Encyclopedia
Other Thieves of our Time
[!] = updated in the last 24 hours
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Recent Posts
Swab your cheek - help save Nalini
Environment-friendly spam
You and I
For Anonymous
Imagine
Why you should send your visiting card to a PR spa...
Do they know it's Christmas?
The problem is us
Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 13
Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 12
D Mervin Ffingir writes, and having writ, moves on:
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If you're fed up of the wimpy which-harry-potter-character-are-you kinda quiz, go see the Quiz Diva. And for the young 'uns and the ones who are reading this in the office, not to worry. They even have a set of Work- and Parent-Safe quizzes.
Our namesake had a bad net day
It started out like any other Monday morning. I booted up my laptop, logged on, checked my email and began browsing the world's news websites.
But at 10.48am my electronic routine was shattered - the web traffic inexplicably stopped dead.
Our laugh-out-loud (for some reason, we cannot get ourself to go "LOL" even though we abuse the language with all manner of other abbreviations when we SMS or chat) moment for the day: the marginalien has hilarious post up on Words with THREE Meanings.
For a Hindustani like me, this attitude is a little mystifying. In our lands, squeezing, groping and fondling your beloved in a public place, if you survived the riot that would most likely break out, would result in a flogging by the village Panchayat or, at the very least, the payment of a equally painful bribe to the staff of the nearest police station. On the other hand, as any woman who has ever traveled on a Delhi Transport Corporation bus will attest, it is perfectly acceptable for men to play with their penises in public: no one will bat an eyelid.Intrepid explorer PS, who we featured in our first Mousetrap column, on taking matters into one's own hands.
Pal Devangshu Datta in Business Standard:
Unfortunately, we carry cellphones into all sorts of situations and a corollary to Murphy’s Law guarantees that the cellphone will always ring when the user is in the loo.Read on.
As this happens, over time, the preferred ring tone becomes associated with popular brands of toilet paper and soap.
If the ringtone happens to be a religious hymn or patriotic ballad, this isn’t particularly appropriate. It gets worse once the ringtone starts to trigger Pavlovian responses by actually provoking the desire to perform natural functions.
That's what we say when star bloggers tag us, even though we hate chain mail.
Also because we're kinda inclined to forgive book-related chain mail.
And also because we're going to stay with the Babu for a few weeks, and the Babu's going to feed us, and we like being fed.
Anyway.
Here's the Book tag meme
(We're just filling these in roughly now, so we can get this hot potato outa our mitts).
Total Number of Books I Own
Um. Lots. A fraction of Nilanjana and DD's stockpile, and we don't have ancestral homes full of books like Annie (the Zig ancestral place did have piles of books, but they were sold for scrap after Granny died. Argh.), but lots.
Last Book I Bought:
Several in one fell swoop. It's the only shopping we do where we go a little mad. We go out to buy just one book, just one, focussed, we-will-not-go-wild-again. And we come out a few hours later with glazed expression and carry bags digging deep into the tender flesh of our artistic hands. Right, where were we? Yes. The Bill Bryson thingy. A trio of Jasper Ffordes. A couple of Pratchetts. Telling Tales. Elsewhere. Stephen King's On Writing for a certain talented young writer we know. And around the same time, a signed copy of pal Anjan Ray's Just Beyond, at his launch. And a few days later, back in Bombay (all the above were picked up in Delhi's Khan Market, except Anjan's book), at the Kalaghoda Fair, three faux-leather-bound classics, Frankenstein, Three Men in a Boat, and Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in one volume. Oh yes - we didn't buy these, but we're slipping all our acquisitions in so we can look all learned like - while in Delhi, Manjula Padmanabhan gave us a fresh-minted, signed copy of her This is Suki!, and Nilanjana gave us a signed copy of her A Matter of Taste. She then borrowed it back for a magazine to shoot the cover, and hasn't returned it, which explains why we're going back to Delhi in the middle of summer.
Last Book I Read:
Short History... accompanies us as we speak. The Archie and Mehitabel Omnibus lies beside our sleeping mat. A volume of world poetry translated into English is dipped into whenever we're feeling particularly nasty about ourselves and when we want to tell ourselves that we should be attempting to write, dammit. Elsewhere, Telling Tales and Just Beyond are also being read bit by bit. And we're going to leave all that behind because we're going to Nilanjana and DD's bookshelves for the next few weeks. Er, we meant to say their home.
Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:
To Kill a Mockingbird If we ever get be a dad, we want to be like Atticus.
H2G2. All of 'em. Even though DNA broke our heart by showing us that there was such a thing as funny SF&F, and we wouldn't be able to corner the market by inventing a new genre.
Anything by Wodehouse. When we can write one-third as well, we'll be a great writer.
Elements of Style
The Readers' Digest Encyclopaedia, Volume Three Favourite reading since we were first told to "go look it up." We haven't stopped since.
And all the books we're reading at the moment. We're impressionable.
Tag Five People And Ask Them To Do This On Their Blogs:
We weren't going to do this bit, as our form of protest against being tagged, killing this strain of the wild
Hah.
Top that.
.
Like corporate annual reports,
Odes to summer, are, I confess,
Not among my favourite thoughts;
They're things I write under duress.
But having decided I would write one,
I sit, sweating, with pursed lips,
Should I make it funny, a light one?
Glib, nonsensical, even - gasp - flip?
(Alas! I'm using up the quota
Of lines the classic sonnet permits.
I wouldn't mind if it was shorter.
A full fourteen lines can be the pits.
Only two more lines? What a bummer!)
Oh well. Here's my poem: I hate summer.
Written (in a bus, in a bout of self-loathing at not having written anything that wasn't work for ages) for, and read at, Caferati's Bombay Summer read-meet.
Note: [*] = The site linked to requires registration.
Zig's on Twitter
Follow, all ye who must know more.Words
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually produce a masterpiece. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
~ Eyler Coates
to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting
~ e e cummings
In three words i can sum up everything I've learned about life.
It goes on.
~ Robert Frost
Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
~ Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)
I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
~ Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright, "Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
~Thomas Mann, novelist, Nobel laureate (1875-1955)
The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
~ Al Rogers
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
~ Henry Winkler, actor (1945- )
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)
Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, author (1689-1762)
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige
Fake it till you make it.
~ (Heard on West Wing)
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