The Mullet Haircut and other tales...


This post on Turbanhead led me to discover a delightful collection of short movies and trailers from all over the world at Absolut Pictures(Look for Absolut Pictures under Absolut Campaigns). Mulit is a western production in 70's bollywood style which tells the tale of a slick Mumbai hair dresser, Mulit who accidently invents the mullet hairdo as the result of an unfinished haircut when his affair with the Prime Minister's daughter lands him in trouble. The movie was shot in location in Mumbai and a CG team worked on it to give it a vintage bollywood movie look with some film degradation and patchy scene breaks. The starry skies and birds flying over the palace were also added later by the team. The Absolut vodka botttle images are also scattered throughout the movie in the form of palace arches, salon flooring and even the salon's licence cancellation stamp. It's hilarious though, for those who understand hindi to attempt to correlate the hindi dialogue with the english subtitles which were probably created by people who got carried away by their creativity.

There are some delightful trailers for fictional movies created by Sam Raimi, Spike Lee, Tarsem(who directed the J.Lo movie 'The Cell') and others.

{Collection of Absolut ads :: Bolllywood Images}

Google Watching...

Google, the king of search world, the deity to whom we webmasters and web-users bow every day, has its fair share of haters. The awesome power that Google wields over how we use and view the web has resulted in Google-Watchers, people who watch every move that Google makes. Every time Google updates its search index (roughly every month), groups of people rise up in protest at their websites being demoted for no apparent reason. Salon has analyzed the anti-Google movement and the wolves waiting in the shadows to trample over the elephant, if someone powerful enough to do that appears on the scene. Already Yahoo! is building its armaments with its acquisition of Inktomi, while Microsoft has decided that it needs to weild power over the only part of our lives untouched by the Will of Bill.

Google of course, is on its way to immortality by becoming a metaphor for search, and also spawning a culture of its own. Google washing and Google whacking are rituals of this sublime cult of the geeks. For all we know, the thinking of an entire generation may be shaped by the algorithms created at Google. Well Google is a nice company. (But as my colleague says... "yeah, for now!")

[Check out the new Google Toolbar with it's built-in popup killer and support for Blogger]

Education vs...

The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at ASU has been renamed as the Ira Fulton School of Engineering, thanks to a very generous $50m grant from him. Hopefully now, research will not be as cash strapped as it used to be. Makes me wonder though.. why does prez Michael Crow have to grovel for a share of $400m for education while congress readily grants $80 billion for war? Surely someone has their priorities all wrong.

And I say duhh...

Natalie Angier writes in the NY Times about how the destinies of men are determined by the length of their.. vertebra (what were you thinking about?). Apparently the average American guy is 5 foot 9 1/2 and those who are below that height are "are at elevated risk of dropping out of school, drinking heavily, dating sparsely, getting sick or depressed. They have a lower chance of marrying or fathering children than do taller men, and their salaries tend to be as modest as their stature..." while the tall freakos "give nearly all the orders, win most elections, monopolize girls and monopolies, and disproportionately splay their elongated limbs across the cushy unconfines of first-class cabins. By the simple act of striding into a room, taller than average men are accorded a host of positive attributes having little or nothing to do with height: a high IQ, talent, competence, trustworthiness, even kindness".
Apparently studies show that only 3% of American chief executives are 5'7" or shorter. Well, as a 5'4" guy, all I can say is duhh..

Here's something for those of you who enjoy trying out browsers other than IE. Clarification: I have nothing against IE and I believe that it renders pages beautifully and gives wonderful options to programmers like me, but I love it when people come out with browsers which do pretty much the same without gobbling up all my memory and then crashing. One such browser is the Mozilla Firebird (used to be called Phoenix till April this year). It does tabbed browsing like Opera and big-daddy Mozilla/Netscape, is an extremely light program and renders HTML pretty much the way IE does.( Safari on the Mac is another light browser which renders HTML much faster than IE does) The best feature in Firebird is the address bar which doubles as a Google search bar and takes you to the "I'm feeling lucky" page if you enter search terms. Also, you can search for links in the page by simply clicking anywhere on the screen and typing out letters while the browser highlights the best matching links on the page. It also has a neat popup blocker. These new browsers employ the new philosophy of stripping down browsers instead of loading them with features. IE gives plenty of features but that makes it a heavy and buggy browser. The Firebird and Safari concentrate on giving features that users really need to enhance their web experience. The philosophy doesn't apply to Firebird's parent browser, Mozilla (or Netscape for that matter) which are huge, bulky useless browsers that make browsing a real pain in the you-know-where.

Being Green Ain't Easy Mister

I vaguely remember having read Hulk comics as a kid. They were very different from the usual comics, in that they were oversized, very glossy and very beautiful, much like the Asterix and TinTin comics. The Hulk was way different from the usual action hero in that he didn't have any control over his transitions and like Mr. Hyde, you never knew if he was going to be good or evil when he transformed into a green giant. (Though, you truly believed that he was good since as you see, he was a comic book hero). Ang Lee's interpretation of this comic book character goes beyond the usual comic book movies in trying to instill an emotional element in the movie. Bruce Banner is still the victim of exposure to Gamma Rays, but he is also the victim of genetic experiments performed by his dad even before he was born, and he is the victim of emotional trauma and an empathy-less world. Lee brings out those moments beautifully, but he falters whenever the green giant appears on screen. The emotional moments are touching, but the green giant does not shock you, terrify you, or even make you believe that he is anything but a computer generated character. The fact that he is endowed with sudden cartoon-like movements (in deep contrast to the movements around him) doesn't make him any more believable. Unlike Spider-Man in Sam Raimi's version, the Hulk is never cool, nor does he appear as a hero since he makes it amply clear that it isn't easy being a Hulk. The only scene where the Hulk does something proactive is where he fights three mutated dogs to save his ex-girlfriend Ross. In every other scene, he is simply reacting to all the bullets and bombs around him. If you were a kid, you wouldn't really like to see your hero just run away from chasing helicopters and try to dodge bullets with a worried 'why me?' look, would you? Ang Lee seems to be enjoying the possibilities of all the special effects prowess in his grasp, as he literally interprets the comic book as, well as comic book with scene transitions appearing as panels (like the Eminem video for Without Me). The downside of his approach is that you never forget that you are watching a movie/comic with panel transitions appearing just when you begin to get involved in the scene. To tell the truth, I never really found out if I liked the movie or not. Watch it and decide for yourself.

Waiting for Potter.

I may not be 9-12, the recommended age group for Harry Potter books, but I've enjoyed every one of them and you bet I'm waiting for the fifth book just as eagerly as anyone else! I was prejudiced against Potter for a long time as I felt that nothing could compare to the magic of Enid Blyton, and the first book was no shakes, but each subsequent book was wonderful enough to make me a convert. I wonder though, how 9 year old kids could manage to make sense of The Goblet of Fire which is only a fraction smaller than War and Peace!
Meanwhile, kids and adults are speculating on what surprises The Order of the Phoenix will bring. The speculation ranges from Potter's romantic inclinations to the fate of Dumbledore. Hmm.. I"ll just wait till I find someone to lend me a copy.

Have a heart and forward an email, u sucker!

Every few days, I receive an email with a very touching story about some kid who's always dying of cancer with the footnote that if I forward it to a zillion guys, The Great Benevolent Society of Boneheads or something like that will pay the kid 3 cents for each person on the list. It's so easy to help someone, right? Just click on the names in your address book, and presto, you've reserved a plush seat in heaven for yourself! One email I received a couple of days ago said that someone actually forwarded that email to 500 friends! (Shame on you!) Now that set me thinking... If every person forwards the email to at least two people (ya, stingy friendless buggers), then it would form a geometric progression, so at the rate of 3 cents per email, the poor kid would receive.. let's see:(approx figures)

after 1 stage : 6 cents

after 5 stages : 2 dollars

after 10 stages : 60 dollars

after 30 stages : 64 million (uh, oh!)

after 50 stages : 67,500 billion! (faint.)

not bad, eh? or are we all suckers? Neither can anyone track your email to find out how many people you forwarded it to, nor does anyone have enough money to fulfill the above fantasy. Just forward the email to your trash can. That way, you can at least be charitable to your email provider by not clogging their networks.

In Truth We Trust


Jonathan Koomey writes in an IEEE Spectrum article (mem) about how unsubstantiated claims appearing in a reputed publication can get quoted over and over again till it becomes popular wisdom. An article in Forbes,99 (subs: the article is available free on this list-serve) stated that the Internet accounts for 8% of all energy used in the United States, Computing equipment uses 13% of US energy and (the best sounding one) that a wireless Palm VII uses as much electricity as a refrigerator when you take into account all the networking equipment used to provide the wireless service. As reported in the spectrum article, these claims sounded great and were irresistible (a google search shows how highly quoted these claims were), but people missed the fact that the work behind the story was funded by a lobbying arm of the coal industry. The story was undoubtedly used to push for more energy plants just as a claim that the data flowing over the Internet doubles every 100 days was picked up by the industry which overbuilt network capacity which would never be used before the equipment became obsolete. People believe what they want to believe, and during the tech boom, claims such as these were instrumental in building up networking and data storage capacity, while claims about Internet spending fuelled the thousands of failed dotcoms.

Tum Ho Who?

According to Wired, a group of linguistic researchers were given an assignment by DARPA to develop a tool to translate between Hindi and English - within a month! It is a mock run for a hypothetical situation where it might become necessary to translate quickly between some foreign language and English due to war or a terrorist attack. It would be great if a tool like that found it's way to Google's language toolbox. However, if the objective is to monitor opinion in India, having a Hindi-English tool is probably unnecessary. For one, english newspapers are widely read throughout India, and as far as regional newspapers go, Hindi represents a very small segment of the nation - every state speaks a different language and has dozens of newspapers in that language. It's a great exercise though, and hopefully the research results will find civilian applications too.

Newsworthy events (in decreasing order of importance)
1. Bought the new iPod
2. Have Cox Cable Internet working at home

What I really wanted to talk about was the iPod, but I didn't want to appear fixated either, as people are probably sick of hearing about the iPod from me. Just four words about it will do: Bought it, Love it.

The Adventures of Captain Nemo

Saw the delightful movie 'Finding Nemo' this weekend and am still smiling enough to talk about it. The animation is so wonderful that after a while it hardly feels like an animated movie. As many others have pointed out, it must have been an awfully hard job to give the fishes so much character when all you have to work with is two eyes and a mouth. Nemo is the only surviving kid of a hyper clown fish named Marlin who is a typical over protective single parent.(He's not funny, all he knows is one joke which he tells pathetically) When a scuba diving dentist 'kidnaps' Nemo for his office aquarium, Marlin begins his quest to find his son. He is joined by a delightful sidekick who loses her memory every few minutes and they take us along with them on their journey to Sydney harbor. They meet a trio of sharks who turn out to be enrolled in a hilarious 12-step program to improve their public image. 'Fish are friends, not food' they intone, but a whiff of blood is enough to turn one of them into a raving bloodthirsty monster. Every sea creature in the movie has a funny personality. There's a group of totally hip sea turtles who take them along the EAC freeway (uh, the East Australian Current) to Sydney. There's also the dentist's niece who looks awful and has the evil reputation of having killed all the fish pets she's previously had. (When she makes her appearance they play music from 'Psycho'). Also a set of menacing sea birds who keep screaming 'mine..mine..mine..' when they spot a crab or a fish. And a pelican.. and a set of funny fish in the aquarium.. one of them claims to have been bought on e-bay.. one that hoards the bubbles from the aerator.. an extra hygienic lobster... boy, I'm giving away everything.. go watch the movie, and when it ends, stick on for the credits, they're funny too.