India Signing.

Or at the very least, Bombay Rocking.
A bit late in the day, but if, like us, you have happy memories of many wonderful concerts in Rang Bhavan, we urge you to sign the Save Rang Bhavan petition.

"simple. you'll see one word at the top of the following page.
you have sixty seconds to write about it."
Check out one word.

With comments and trackbacks, guestmap and zonkboard, email id and skype handle - it lets me have conversations, make connections and network with people whom i share interests with. And engages me in meaningful dialogues. And i grow, as a result.
With Technorati (the new beta version is pretty cool btw) and Blogstreet, Blogshares and Sitemeter - i allow you into and share with you my reader community.
With blogrolls and by building links into posts, i share with you people who's thoughts i enjoy reading.
With newsreaders and aggregators i discover more about others than i would through 'pleasantries' exchanged through my Ryze guestbook and stars or cubes or hearts as Orkut had.

Extracted from My Blog is my Social Software and my Social Network at Conversations with Dina

And now we know what 'leftist' really means.

Apparently, ladies, working out is good for you. And guys, size does matter. Examine your amygdala.

We should be working, or at least getting out into the fresh air, but we just found us a wonderful collection of American Poems.
cummings, Dickinson, Eliot, Emerson, Frost, Longfellow, Nash, Parker, Sandburg, Whitman... and more.

Hotmail and Yahoo are thinking about charging senders for email, allegedly to help fight spam. But "the user community is highly critical about the monetary approach. They see it as a trick by ISPs to open up a new revenue stream. Gates tried to allay this fear by talking about a system that would allow users to waive charges for friends and relatives." One of the possible methods is that "the email postage ... to go to the email recipient's internet provider." Other extracts from the ET article "Some experts expect the e-postage charges to rapidly escalate after starting out small." (BTW, ET and TOI seem to have the Shove-As-Many-Ads-Down-The-Reader's-Throat-and-also-Push-Up-The-Hits down to a science. That short article is spread out over four page views!)

The stats we get for this blog aren't that bad, but somehow we can't seem to get anyone to make any comments. But an article in the Observer, about authors writing glowing reviews of their own books on Amazon, gave us an idea. (Via Kitabkhana.)

Read The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus and much will be clearer to you, my children.

Sigh. As if there weren't enough thieves of time on the net... But now that you're here, go see Addicting Games.com.

"Frutex, Americanus. Faecal prodigium, sit." ("Bush, the American. A faecal portion, he is.") What His Holiness might have been saying to Blair.

Hm. Yet another search engine.

We understand people liking some TV news anchors better than others, based on nothing but their looks. When we were very young, watching DD's black and white English news, we nurtured crushes on several lovely ladies. Even now, when we should know better, and watch the news to keep informed, we'll admit to thinking Sarah Jacob is rather hot, that Nidhi Razdan is quite something, that there are several other anchors, reporters and weather ladies across the channels who are quite simply eye candy. But we didn't know things had got as far as fan clubs!

If you're the visually-oriented type, brought up on slide presentations and new media, chances are a list of links to your site or a site report won't do it for you. Or you just might like playing with an interesting toy. Try out the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser to see where your home page or blog (or any other site for that matter) fits into the matrix that is the web.

Loads of instructional fun for you and the kiddies at the Beeb's Human Body page. Test anatomy knowledge or your senses, find out whether you have a male of female brain and how good you are at spotting a fake smile or reading a face.

India's parliamentarians are wondering why they didn't think of this first.

The powers that be in the UK are thinking that perhaps they have too many inquiries. So, guess what they did? They set up an inquiry.

How many social networks are too many?

Found while Ryzeing:
"Shall I compare thee to a prairie vole?
Thou art more faithful and monogamous.
Rough winds may blast thee, stress may take its toll
And botox leave thy brow impervious;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
And oft thy sun-cream UV rays lets through;
And every perfect pout at last declines
Into a wrinkled spouse's sulking moue.
But our strong love shall not its power lose
While opioids keep us on the straight and narrow
While oxytocin does its magic prove
And vasopressin binds us one to other.
So long as men can keep their hormones potent
They'll be romantic as that model rodent."
From the Economist, in reaction to this piece, which says that scientists are finding that, after all, love really is down to a chemical addiction between people.

And there's this article, also from the Economist: "Women who prefer wooing to being wooed can take advantage of the fact that this year is a leap year and wait for St Oswald’s day ... On that day, February 29th, once every four years women are enjoined to make the first move. In non-leap years to come, impatient women might want to join the Roman Catholic Church and celebrate St Oswald’s day on February 28th." and "Shares are the popular new way of expressing love ... 47% of women and 38% of men are intending to buy shares as a gift this year."

Yes. We're wearing black. Just our little way of marking St Valentine's Day. :-P Like the look? Tell us.

If you have the Google toolbar installed, move your eye a few inches upwards. Cute li'l Valentine's Day gimmick from the Goog. May the fat little fella shoot all your butts full of arrows.

We're not running the Mumbai Marathon - we have neglected our health and are fat and unfit again, maybe next year we will attempt to trot along in the wake of the real runners - but lots of other people are. Meet the mother-son pair who are doing it for charity. Here's where you can go to pledge money for their efforts.

Buy her a Big Mac, get her drunk, and you're in, mate.

Such sweet sorrow
Want to break up and don't have the cohones to do it yourself? There is, you will be relieved to hear, a service (available online) that will write the letter, make the call, even meet the jiltee on your behalf. Consider it our Valentine's Day gift to you. (Yeah, yeah, we're cynical and embittered.) Via Old Hag.

We admit we don't blog under our real name. But we don't make it impossible to figure out who is behind the first person plural. Not everyone agrees, though. The pros and cons of anonymous blogging. Via Gothamist (where you'll also find a rather interesting set of comments below that post) by way of Eurotrash's must-read take.

"I cannot easily imagine a sadder, more wasteful, end to the life of a tree." "the sort of pretentious drivel lapped up by suburban America which goes on to be made into a maudlin movie." "the most badly-written, trite, pseudo-spiritual bollocks ever to reach publication, and is nothing more than a cynical (and sadly successful) attempt to exploit impressionable, new age dimwits and recovering Catholics." The Independent's readers diss some the books they love to hate.
From way back in June, i know, but i just found it (via T.)

A while ago, we said we'd sign up with all the major Social Networking sites and report back, but we got as far as using Ryze, signing up with Friendster and then got all shamefaced about spamming our entire contact list with Join requests once more. And now we've signed up with Orkut, thanks to the magnanimity of a Ryze contact. The way things are going in our life, we are very tempted to cash in (Orkut memberships are going for US$10 on e-Bay, according to Sean at Flashblogging - that's the link above), but, sigh, if you want one, mail.
We may just get down to writing that analysis if we can get a magazine to pay for it. But meanwhile, check out this, and this follow up. (Link via PatternHunter.)
(-: On the other hand, if you're sick of all this stuff, you may want to consider Introvertster:-)

From William Gibson's blog: "I've found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I've most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I'm doing this I'm definitely not writing a novel -- that is, if I'm still blogging, I'm definitely still on vacation."
Well, fellow bloggers, what do you think? Is this keeping us away from "real" writing?

It's because the male pigeons refuse to stop and ask for directions.

That's why we don't say "as the pigeon flies."

"And George compared me to Churchill yesterday. Like, how cool is that?"

The Labour party is considering giving Tony Blair a weblog as part of its attempt to make its general election campaign an "engaging dialogue with the British people."
Later addition to this post: And we think that old Miserable Failure (damn, he's moved down to number two on the list) read this before he went all grandiloquent.

Everyone's a critic

"It sounds like when your wee goes back up." "This isn't singing, it's just screaming." "It's a witch singing." "Maybe he's been run over." "He sounds like he's just smelled something really bad, like cat poo."
The Guardian got a bunch of six- and seven-year-olds to comment on some classic rock.

Would you open mail from Zig Zackly?

"Though it seems impossible to imagine the unwanted e-mail known as spam as anything but a nuisance, there is something creative about these return addresses - even if they are being used for untoward purposes." Lisa Napoli in the New York Times on the new gimmick spammers are using: improbable sender names*.

Looking for some legit names to use in your fiction? Found in the article above, these links to name generators. Also this one, which "merges names from the worlds of Harry Potter and of Dickens."

You mean people still use postage stamps?

We're doing our bit for the diaspora. American desis are trying to get the US Postal Department to issue a Diwali stamp. They have put up a petition, which, we're told, must get 500,000 signatures. Do pass it along to others in the land of the, er, free.

To the three people who asked where i was, the spirit was willing, but the phone line was weak. So much damn static that i was only getting really slow, unstable connections. Anything more than the essential mail and some research (for, ironically, an article on blogging) and i would have probably wound up smashing something in sheer frustration. But now, like Arnold, i'm baak.