Life in General

Poor old teachers

2011-01-08T11:55:00.001-08:00

Are teachers really the fundamental problem with the American school educational system? If you believe Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee and the people behind "Waiting for Superman" it seems that the main reason American kids are not all that competent academically is because teachers can't be fired at will.
Presumably Chinese teachers go by in mortal fear of imminent firing thus motivating them to teach ever better. Ditto for Finnish and Singaporean teachers and the other 26 countries who apparently have students performing better than American ones.

My take on this shifts the problem squarely to parenting or lack thereof. When a significant number of children don't have 2 parents at home, when the parents who are present don't have the time or inclination to sit with their kids while they complete their homework, or help them with it, at least in the early stages (times tables, anyone?)- is it any wonder they perform poorly in school?

By virtue of meeting my children's teachers and the time I spend tutoring at a local elementary school I have encountered about 20 odd elementary school teachers. Not one of them would I categorise as lazy or not dedicated. Yeah sure, not all have the same teaching skills but that holds for every profession. But all these teachers were interested in their students doing well, were interested in implementing whatever reforms the system asked them to do, most of them spend additional money from their pockets to buy supplies for the classroom. I don't see any reason to think that these 20 odd random teachers are an exclusive minority, if anything they have to represent the majority of the teachers. They struggle with kids who don't have the basics coming into school, kids who cannot master the basics because their only education happens in the school, kids who join school speaking not a word of English.

Are there bad teachers? Sure. Are there teachers who know they can't be fired and so are willing to coast through doing the bare minimum if that? Sure. Are there teachers whose lack of ability compromises the learning of the students under them? Sure.
But are these teachers the main reason that the education system is sucky? Certainly not!

The deification of sports stars

2010-01-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

The Tiger Woods affair leads me to speculate how something like this would play out in India. Let's use Sachin as an example. After all Tendulkar is idolised more Woods can even begin to conceive.

Say, Sachin has a "small house". Firstly, would this news ever become public? It's in everybody's best interest that this information stay hidden-Sachin's for obvious reasons, the fans' because they don't need to see their idol defiled, his sponsors' because he can continue to endorse their products without the companies looking bad.

Is it really possible that all these cricketers, mostly young men in their 20's earning millions, mixing with Bollywood, living the high life all around- they are all living "clean" lives? As India becomes increasingly liberalised and aspires to Western mores, aren't there bound to be groupies who wouldn't mind notching a Dhoni or Yuvraj on their bed posts? Surely the Indian media is doing a bang-up job of keeping their cavorting under wraps!

Back to the Tiger thing- is it an American thing to be unable to separate the sportsman from the man? Sachin isn't touted for being the perfect father or husband-not that he isn't, I am sure he is as devoted as they come- but people adore Sachin the cricketer, not Sachin the daddy, and rightfully so.

Did Gillette and AT&T have to withdraw their sponsorship because they were worried that Joe Q Woods' fan would switch to Schick or Sprint? After all now their products were being endorsed by a known philanderer as opposed to the arguably best golfer ever, right?
For that matter, was Joe Q Woods' fan buying Gillette to begin with because it was being endorsed not just by arguably the greatest golfer ever but also a devoted husband and father?

Is the same fan going to stop watching Woods for this reason? Did people stop going to watch the Yankees in the 20's and 30's because their roster featured an overweight ball player who caroused all the time and cheated on his wife or did they go to watch Babe Ruth hit home runs?

If Woods projected the image of ideal father and husband it was because it was thrust upon him. He, or his agents, were mercenary enough to realise that the public wanted him to be this perfect figure and darn it, they were going to provide the public with one.
The public was stupid for wanting him to be anything more than arguably the best golfer ever

Grammar

2009-10-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm no longer the grammar policeman I used to be. Partly because I'm quite fallible myself and leave myself exposed to corrections galore and partly because I'm inured. However, there are still some solecisms that get me. I've spoken elsewhere about the "your/you're" abuse and the "their/there/they're" mixups and misplaced apostrophes. Well, here is another, fortunately, not so frequent, irritant...

How often do you come across constructs like this that make you flinch? This is an example of starting to write a sentence and then not being willing to back up and rephrase it! From Slate.com

The body in charge of assigning and overseeing domain names said that Internet addresses will soon be able to be spelled in any of the world's scripts, not just the Latin alphabet.

So, internet addresses have the ability to spell? Or is it you and I who have the ability to spell internet addresses?

Mary J Blige- The One- song also used in AT&T commercial

2009-09-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Why isn't there more acknowledgement of the fact that this song is an eeyadichan copy of "Hare Ram, Hare Ram" from Bhool Bhulaiya?

Googling "mary J blige" "bhool bhulaiya" has quite a few hits but none officially admitting this- has Pritam not been made aware of this yet? Or is he in the imitation is the sincerest form of flattery mode?

Pokkisham- a review

2009-09-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Pokkisham, more than anything else, is a showcase for Cheran's writing abilities. I found it interminably long, the plot device of having the son read Cheran's diary entries and Cheran's and Padmapriya's letters palled pretty soon and the whole thing became an exercise in how flowery could Cheran express his love and regret.
Even given I'm not schooled in Tamil, and that my knowledge of the language is strictly functional, which meant that I couldn't appreciate the writing, my grouse is that a movie is not a vehicle for reading 'literature' aloud. Which is really what much of the 2 plus hours of this movie ended up being.
The story FWIW, is fairly cliched (boy meets girl, falls in love, girl's father opposed to relationship)- so it needed something special to move it along, not an endless series of vignettes with voice overs. And did I say how slow this moved? Wading thru molasses...

Sporting what-ifs

2009-09-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

What if Ichiro had made his major league debut before the age of 28?
What if Monica Seles hadn't been stabbed?
What if Ayrton Senna hadn't died?
What if Gale Sayers hadn't been injured?
What if WWII hadn't interrupted the Don's career?
What if Nadal's career hadn't intersected that of Federer as early as it did?
What if MJ hadn't taken time off to play baseball?

What drives consumption?

2008-11-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

I was watching 60minutes this past Sunday and one of the items was about this huge dump in China where electronic stuff is sent for recycling. In the introduction to this piece they talked about the culture here in the US where people constantly keep replacing their otherwise functional items and dump them. I dumped a couple of working monitors on the sidewalk but rationalised it by saying that
a) replacing CRT's with LCD's reduces energy consumption and
b)I was getting more desk space

I didn't take the trouble to find a place where they recycle monitors in a green fashion, so I am guilty of that.

Anyhow back to the consumption culture- people do replace all sorts of electronic items like cell phones and digicams and DVD players on a fairly frequent basis just because a new version has come out

Bolt v Phelps

2008-08-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

Just saw this poll on ESPN's website where like 80% of the people rank Phelps above Bolt as the athlete of the Olympics. Of course all 100% of them are American!

I wonder how many Americans knew about Mark Spitz, say, 3 months before this Olympics. Expand that poll to the world outside the US and the number would be even smaller. At the same time ask the world outside about Carl Lewis- the answer is bound to be resoundingly in the affirmative.

Likewise 20 years from now way more people will remember Usain Bolt than Michael Phelps. Of course it helps if you are a champion sprinter called Bolt.

Why?

At the end of the day swimming is primarily a rich (OK well off) white person's sport. Once you take Australia and the US out of the equation how many other nations won medals? Not many. How many were non-white? Even fewer (that Algerian guy really stood out, didn't he?) Even the Zimbabwean swimmer is white.

Many other Olympic sports are the prerogative of rich white people- dressage, sailing, modern pentathlon, ballroom dancing (what? ballroom dancing isn't a sport? could've sworn it was, along with trampolining and rhythmic gymnastics )

The majority of people in the world have limited, if any access to swimming pools, everyone has taken part in a running race at some point in their life.

And that is the reason why people remember Lewis and will remember Bolt- running fast is the most elemental of athletic activities. It's the simplest competition, no equipment needed, just some open ground.
[I'd classify long jump and javelin as the other two "elemental" athletic activities.
The high jump is not a skill required very often, we are more likely to face a requirement to jump across a gap than over a wall (we will clamber over it)
The shot and discuss require peculiar motions to be successful, the javelin is simple. Just run and throw- the exact motion that a child is bound to execute if you ask him to throw something as far as he can ]

Sorry Michael, you are undoubtedly the greatest swimmer ever, arguably the greatest Olympian, but definitely not in the same bracket as Bolt when it comes to identification.

Btw, does anyone remember a guy called Alexander Dityatin? Won 8 medals at a single Olympics (not all gold). No. Why? He won them in gymnastics- another sport like swimming that enables an Olympian to win multiple medals more easily than athletics. Or how about Larissa Latynina who won 18 medals across 3 Olympics (again, in gymnastics)

Cheering at game shows

2008-05-09T12:15:00.001-07:00

Quick thought- why does the audience cheer when people make money on game shows, especially the kind where there is more luck than talent involved? (Deal or No Deal for instance)
It isn't as if the winners are going to share their largesse with the audience. It isn't as if the winners demonstrated some skill or knowledge the audience lacked for which they are appreciative. They just picked a box, people. Just a box!

Obama charges for bumper stickers

2008-05-09T12:06:00.001-07:00

I was quite taken aback to find out that a Barack Obama bumper sticker is going to set me back 3 bucks. So now I should pay to root for someone? The space on my bumper is worth more than 3 bucks!
Tell me, Mr Presumptive nominee, if I am willing to campaign for you by sporting a sticker that supports you on my car, why do you expect me to shell out money for that? Aren't I doing you a favour?
Considering the mega-millions you have raised for your campaign wouldn't it make sense to give away bumper stickers and pins?

See a sports team doesn't need my vote, but you do. You not only need my vote but you need me to convince others to vote for you. And by sporting that sticker I am helping in that regard. I most certainly don't want to pay you in addition to telling people to vote for you.

Sorry my man, you may get my vote, but you most certainly don't get my 3 bucks!

Why I didn't like Taare Zameen Par

2008-01-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

I posted some of these thoughts on the IMDB discussion board for this movie but was not all done. So here goes.

It's not often that I am completely at odds with the populace on a movie, but, boy, is this one of them! Sentimental claptrap, created with the intent of extracting every last tear drop from the audience, that is what I thought this was.
Not one cliche was spared- insensitive teachers, angry and abusive father, concerned mother, one caring teacher, documentary clips, spastic children enjoying...

The one cliche that was left out was the principal scolding Nikhum for taking the kids out of class, though it was amply offset by the scene where Nikhum feeds the boy at the roadside chai shop, tea and biscuits.

5 minutes into the movie I told my wife the kid was dyslexic. I knew about dyslexia more than 20 years ago (thanks to cartoon graffiti of the sort "Dyslexia lures KO" and "Lysdexia rules") and so found it difficult to believe that in 21st century India, in a private school, people were unaware of it.

Forget dyslexia specifically, I found it difficult to believe that the kid had spent 5 years in a private school (KG, 1st std, 2nd std, 2 years in 3rd std) and none of the teachers had figured out that he couldn't write his ABC's? How did he get to 3rd std anyway given that he must have been getting single digit marks in his exams all along?

Or that his mother supposedly spent time over his homework each night and still hadn't realised that her ladla couldn't string letters together to make a word (far less words to make a sentence)

The father character- he was fine while he was angry, once he started to cry, he was like the guy who played Himanshu Malik's dad in the Khwaahish movie!

Nikhum, being a dyslexic growing up was yet another avoidable cliche. And the whole deal where the teachers in the staff room take him to task because they heard singing and dancing in his classroom- haven't we seen that more than once (Dead Poet's society springs to mind, as does its Malayalam derivative with Mohanlal)

It was kind of gratifying to see that the review in Variety, the Hollywood magazine, picked on all these aspects.

OK, enough venting- time for lunch

Overrated

2008-01-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

A couple of things I think are overrated in schools
a) Reading
b) Teaching arts and music

Reading
When did reading become this all-consuming obsession? "Read to your children everyday" they tell you starting with like age 1. "Have your child read for at least 20 minutes each day". You have incentives to read, targets to meet, forms to fill out detailing what you read and how many minutes you read- there is no end to it.

While a lot of school and college drop-outs and prematurely toothless hillbillies obviously didn't do enough reading, there is no cause-effect relationship here.

Most of the successful people I know and have met read very little apart from what is necessary for their job. They might read a sports column or two. They don't spend any of their spare time reading meaningful literature or having meaningful discussions. These are people who make a good living, have flush 401(K)'s, whose children's college funds are, well, funded, drive nice cars- in short meet most of the requirements for success in today's world.

So what is the need to obsess about reading? Yeah, if you like enjoy reading and prefer it to watching re-runs of Seinfeld, more power to you. But you are no better than someone who watches Seinfeld re-runs, so there.

Music and arts
School is for the 3 R's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic. The public school system should have no business using tax money to teach kids to play the violin or draw landscapes. Interested parents can do this outside of school on their own coin. For a person to succeed in life (for the vast majority of them, anyway) s/he needs to have the right education to get a job that pays a decent salary so they don't have to fret about money all the time. This kind of education involves letters and numbers not musical notes or paint palettes.

Schools should focus on teaching their students what they can use in later life to go to college and find a job. Sure a minority of people get jobs in music and arts, but they can go to special schools for that.

Children get adequate exposure to music outside of school anyway, thru TV and radio and MP3 players. It is not as if they won't listen to music if they are not taught music in school. This is more than sufficient to spur their creativity.

All that guff about children in some inner-city schools who became better students because some violin teacher taught them- well if some maths teacher had come along and taught them addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they would have been better equipped for later life. After all way more people need maths in their later life than violin classes.

Stop bothering

2007-11-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

I have found that up till one is about 30 one can be fairly insouciant about what one puts into one's mouth. I don't advocate complete disregard of course, childhood obesity is becoming worse in the US (and presumably elsewhere in the developed world). But you don't see doctors telling too many people in their 20's to worry about sodium intake and triglyceride levels. For the most part the metabolism of a younger person takes care of such things.
For example, in my case, I could drink all the beer I wanted till I was about twenty nine w/o putting on an ounce of weight, I was stuck at around 60 kg and a waist-size of 29-30 or so. But a couple years down the line I was a size 32, and in fact "ballooned" to 70+ kg and a pant size of almost 34 by age thirty five. My cholestrol teetered over the 200 mark. Then I became a bit more realistic about what I could eat and drink, cut down on virtually all fried food (including papads) and have been a size 32 since, hovering around the 140-145 lb mark.

Anyhow the point I am trying to make is that at some point most of us start fussing about what we consume, start to exercise etc etc. The intent being to prolong one's life, or rather avoid a premature demise. This could be because we have kids and have attendant responsibilities or because we want to enjoy what life has to offer for longer periods of time or both. For the most part it is not conscious, right? Everyone else you know is watching their weight, working out, so you do it too.

Let us assume then that is is all effective for the most part and that it enables us to have a higher average life expectancy as a result. Now cut to the future. You are say, 70 years old, your kids are settled down, you have grandkids whom you have dandled on your knee and maybe even a great grandkid. You still like sweets and fried food and beer. Should you now let go and start indulging yourself, then? I mean, no one is going to live forever. If you pig out starting at age 70, say, you are likely to cop it in a couple of years as opposed to living to be 77 (which is the average life expectancy for men in the US) but that would be a more enjoyable couple of years than 7 years of self deprivation, would it not?

And it isn't as if people who have maintained a rigorous life style all end up having peaceful deaths in their sleep and don't get some kind of awful disease, the kind you might get from over indulging in fatty foods and icecream!

Just a thought

Evolution of Programming

2007-10-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

In the very beginning of computer programming was binary coding. Y'all must have seen the cartoon with the caption "Real programmers code in Binary". If you haven't here is the link. Anyhow, then came machine code when programmers were able to use HEX 1 thru F. After that it was assembler coding when mnemonics were developed, so programmers could use such instructions as JPNZ (that is on the Zilog 8080, I think) which was a branching instruction and stood for Jump When Not Zero. IBM 360 mnemonics were typically more cryptic so that M stood for MOVE rather than the MOV favoured by 8080.
But no one denied that this was an advancement and easier cf a series of 1's and 0's.

3GL's like Fortran and COBOL were significantly easier than mnemonics and 4GL's/CASE Tools like IEF (the only one that I am familiar with) made application development (as opposed to pure programming) even simpler. For example developing a CICS screen was way quicker in IEF compared to doing it in COBOL/CICS Command Language.
I'd like to digress and say that CICS command language itself was a big step forward from CICS Macro level programming.
And when IEF/Composer/Cool:GEN introduced GUI development tools, it provided an opportunity for existing developers of Block Mode (i.e. green screen) applications a bridge to client server development without major retooling.

Similarly VB did the same thing for non mainframe development,didn't it? It made it so much quicker to create a GUI based app with database access- a huge improvement over using BASICA and QBasic. It spawned the likes of PB and even Access development.

Alas, along came Java and Web development and I feel application development took a major step backward. Someone developing apps for the web these days using JEE needs just so many skills- Java to begin with, then Javascript, JSP, frameworks like Struts or JSF or whatever, other frameworks like Spring, technologies like Hibernate and JLog and the list goes on. (Not to forget good ole SQL)
An IDE like Eclipse is so busy compared to the old VB! There are just so many bits and pieces.

Isn't this regressive? I mean, shouldn't it become easier to develop and deploy applications as computer technology progresses?
Java and .NET developers look down on VB apps as procedural and non portable and so on forgetting the obvious- they served a purpose, mainly to satisfy user requirements in a quick and pleasing fashion.

Languages

2007-10-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

I was watching a Mallu flick the other day and Mammooty said something to the effect of "Vizhuppalakkunathu pinneyaakaam" meaning that the dirty laundry could be washed at a later time.
Which set me thinking how the same proverbs and expressions exist in different languages. Did somebody translate them at some time in the past or is it a reflection of the fact that humans tend to think of the same things wherever they are? A kind of corroboration of the homogeneity of mankind, as it were.

In this instance, did somebody in Kerala come up with the "Vizhuppalakkal" expression when they read the English "washing one's dirty laundry" and thought that Malayalam could do with an equivalent?

Or more common proverbs like "Minnuthellam ponnalla", "Palathulli Peruvellam" and "Vithachathu Koyyum" meaning "All that gli(s)tters is not gold", "Many a drop makes big ocean" and "You reap what you sow"... Did these exist in the Malayalam of the 16th century before any English speakers came to India?

While on the subject, English could be enriched with expressions like
"What place has a cat in a (gold)smithy"
"When I see the dog, I have no stone, and when I have a stone, I see no dog"
"What knows a barren woman of labor pains"
"Is a pickle as good as salt?"

On second thoughts- nah. They are just not as effective!

2 Malayalam movies

2007-10-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

There was a time when most Malayalam movies were tragedies. Or so I think. Sarada, 3 time winner of the Urvasi award given to the best actress at a National level, specialised in tragic roles. Women went to the theatres for a good cry. Made no sense since the life they got back to when they returned home would hardly have been a bed of roses.

Anyway, I recently watched one called Vishnu on Surya. It was as if the filmmakers had decided they wanted to make a flick where Mammootty is killed at the end. So they come up with a preposterous story line where he kills a really bad guy, in self defence, and despite his lawyer putting up a very good case, the judge decides to sentence him to death anyway because the story demanded that. The court scene was actually quite comical with an occasional interjection of "Objection your honour" to be immediately, and I mean immediately, followed by a very curt "Sustained" or "Overruled".
And not being content with that, they spend the last half hour showing his life in jail, which includes his getting married and also the death of his mother from the shock of the sentencing. It all culminates in an execution that has the mandatory dream sequence where he gets a last minute reprieve, only to be denied cruelly.

And then we watched "Oru Minnaminunginte Nurunguvettom". Funnily enough we watched the second half first and never realised that we had missed half the movie. Woman dies giving birth and the child is brought up by "foster" grand parents. Everyone knows all along that the father is going to come back and take the child away and when he does do it, we are treated to 20 minutes of wailing and crying. After the second half got over, the dvd started to play the first part of it and we are like "Oh darn, we missed half the movie"

Which actually is not too bad compared to "Thalolam" which used a similar premise but spent more than half the movie treating us to the crying and sentiments of the couple who were going to give up the child at the end of it all anyway.

Cricket Telecast

2007-10-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

I saw this headline
Doordarshan to telecast cricket ties live: court informed

If this happened in the US, the Senate would mandate that all NFL/NBA games be shown on network TV (free to air) channels. Monday Night Football would continue to be on ABC as well as ESPN. Baseball playoff games could not be just on TBS any more.

I don't know which side to take.
The Americanized me says that, from a free-enterprise point of view this is a retrogressive step. I mean what business has the government to dictate telecast of a non public event. It is not republic day parade, it is a cricket match organised by a private body (BCCI) with private sponsors, right?

The cricket fan in me says that the ordinary people cannot be denied their entertainment. Just because people are too poor to afford cable, should they be denied?

What think you?

Doordarshan to telecast cricket ties live: court informed

The government on Wednesday informed the Delhi High Court that the private TV channels would compulsorily share with the public broadcaster Doordarshan the live feed of all official One-Day Internationals, Twenty20 ties and some Tests of public interest abroad.
Submitting a copy of a notification adding certain clauses in the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharti) Act, 2007, issued in New Delhi on Wednesday, government counsel Rajiv Sharma said all ODIs, Twenty20 matches and selected Tests would be shown live to the Indian viewers.
The semi-finals and finals of the Men's World Cup and the International Cricket Council (ICC) Championship Trophy would also be shown live, according to the notification submitted before the bench headed by Chief Justice MK Sarma.
In July 2007, the high court had issued notice to the government and public broadcasting corporation Prasar Bharti on a petition seeking direction for telecasting all cricket matches, including India-England series held in England earlier this year, live on Doordarshan under the provisions of a recent law.
The Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat, an NGO, had said Doordarshan was not telecasting the India-England series, which is mandatory under the provisions of the Sports Broadcasting Signal Sharing Act.
According to the act, any channel telecasting live sports events featuring India was bound to share the live feed with Doordarshan for the benefit of the public, the petition pointed out.
The petition was disposed of following the government's submission on Wednesday.

Does grammar matter?

2007-10-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

The short answer is, no. Except in the SAT's. At least in the US, that is. My take is that kids deliberately forget their grammar once they enter college and join the work force with near complete disregard for it.
For the most part I don't pay attention to solecisms but a few still continue to irk me. First and foremost is the apostrophe in a plural world (the so called greengrocer's apostrophe). Of late, this apostrophe has crept in almost everywhere a word ends in an 's' leading to such constructions as
"This software let's us automate our tasks".
It is almost as if people have completely lost it when it comes to the usage of an apostrophe. And as for the possessive form of "it", it's rarely that I see it correctly used minus the apostrophe.

Next on the list is the rampant confusion between the possessive pronoun and the abbreviated form of the "is" verb.
So "You're welcome" becomes "Your welcome" and "They're doing it" is now "Their doing it". People seem to forget the distinction between "their" and "there" as well.

And lastly, for now anyway, "lie" and "lay". Granted this is difficult given that "lay" serves as the past tense of "lie" and as a transitive verb in its own right whose past tense is "laid".

So whenever I hear someone saying something like "I was laying in bed last night", I am tempted to ask "what or who". Surprisingly a rock song gets it right when Bon Jovi sings "I will lay you down in a bed of roses". Of course it would have been equally meaningful, perhaps more so from a rock 'n roll perspective, if the "down" had been left out!

A Hopeless case

2007-09-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

I have to say something about the benching of the goalkeeper. Earlier today on ESPN's sports reporters, the host of the show did his last word bit by comparing the benching of Solo to Tony Dungy replacing Manning with Sorgi. This despite Bob Ryan saying during the opening credits that little as he knew about soccer, when a team is completely outplayed and loses 4-0, more than the goalkeeper is at fault.
Keep it up Bob, you know a lot about soccer.

It is indicative of the US sports coverage obsession with tying the results of a game to a single person that a football match's outcome is tied to the goalie. They do this for football which is fairly rational- the QB has a lot to do with (in fact unless you are Dilfer playing for the Ravens, almost everything to do with) the offense.
They do it for baseball which is a bit more unfair but the starting pitcher has a lot to do with the defense- though I feel that the ERA is the absolute measure for a pitcher's success- not his win-loss numbers.
They do it for (ice) hockey- something I can't comment on since I have little familiarity with or interest in that sport.
And now they want to do it for real football.

Back off sports reporters. While a goalie's mistake occasionally costs a team a match, the match is won by the goal scorers. When a team scores no goals and loses, there is no point blaming the person in goal.
Especially when one of the goals is an own goal, it is pretty mean and ignorant to blame the goalie. If Brianna had a brilliant day after that in goal and not let in any other goals, the US would have still lost.

Coach Ryan's decision to bench Solo in favour of Scurry was definitely weird. But it most certainly didn't cost the US the match- they lost to a much better team with arguably the best forward in the game.
Marta- she won the match for Brazil, 'cos she scored goals- something the US didn't!

I have been following football for 30+ years and never have I seen the blame for multi-goal thrashing laid at the goalie's door.

Linux

2007-09-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Just recently converted the PC downstairs that the wife and daughter use, to Ubuntu. No particular reason except perhaps, I don't need to fuss about viruses and stuff as much.

So far no complaints, they have used it mainly for a few websites (gmail, youtube, rediff). Sound worked fine but occasionally seems to die, necessitating a reboot.

But I don't think they could have just jumped in and started to use it after installation was complete.

I had the devil of a time trying to get wireless connectivity to work. I had 3 different adapters with me, a NetGear MA111 v2 which just was not supported, an eHome(Dlink under the covers) 2 dollar piece that was recognised but for which I couldn't get NDISWrapper to work, and a relatively new TrendNet which wasn't recognised period. Which was unfortunate because according the numerous websites I visited, this one actually had worked.

Finally I got one of my friends to return an old no-name adapter that I had lent him and surprise, surprise that worked native without the hassle of NDISwrapper.

Once I had connectivity, I still ran into some issues with firefox plugins. But I think I'd have had the same with IE on Windows- I'd have had to install Real Player even over there. But the media player plugin was an additional hassle that I'd not have had on Windows/IE.

Getting it to work with Raaga was not easy and I still can't navigate between songs or skip the annoying Citibank ad which goes "Do you have loved ones in India..."

Shockwave doesn't work, this I discovered after spending ages trying to get flash to work without realising that the site was actually using shockwave.

Most websites seem to work fine. I can't watch some embedded video, like the US Open's website.

I haven't figured out how to make it suspend and revive it- if I use the suspend option it refuses to wake up and I have to switch it off and on.

I think if I had go a new brand-name wireless adapter, I wouldn't have had a problem. My friend said he just plugged in a stick he found in a bin at the Walmart and it worked straightaway.

I haven't seen if it works with my old web-cam. I don't have an iPod but do have an MP3 player that I should test out.

As to stability- the PC had run XP-home for almost 6 years without a single BSOD, so that will be hard to beat!

In conclusion, can a non-techie person (like the missus) buy one of the new Dell/Ubuntu PC's bring it home and start working? Yes, if they have firefox exposure like she has. And somebody spends a few minutes showing them where the Start->Programs is and how they can get to common apps like, say Office.

The First xxxx-American

2006-03-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

So, when will the media quit focussing on someone being the first African-American to accomplish something? In the recent past it was Shani Davis being the first to get a Winter Olympic individual gold and then Bill Lester the first Nascar driver since 1988.
I don't see the same obsession with the someone being the first Asian American to do something. Was Michele Kwan touted as the first Chinese American to win the US National figure skating title? Was Kalpana Chawla touted in the US as the first Indian American to fly on the shuttle?

And quite definitely no reference to the first Italian American to play center fielder for the Yankees or the first Irish American to win an Oscar. Time was when Jews were still treated in this manner, I think with such references as the first Jew to be admitted to a certain school and so on. For example Moses Alexander is on record as the first Jew to be elected as a governor of a state, or Bess Myerson as the first Jew to win Miss America. But I didn't see any reference to Sasha Cohen being the first Jewish American to win a silver medal for figure skating (is she?)

'Nuff said and off to bed!

No news is good news

2005-11-19T18:07:00.000-08:00

And my no news campaign continues. It must be 5 weeks now since I decided to abstain from news. Meaning, I won't watch news on TV, listen to it on the radio, read it in newspapers or the web. Except for sports that is. I have almost made a fetish of it. I get the newspaper delivered 4 days a week. I pointedly ignore all the sections except sport. I have quit listening to NPR except for Car Talk on weekends, and even that is only if I happen to be on the road b/w 11 and 12.
The only news I now get is what I inadvertently look at when I go to news.google.com and click on the sports link on the LHS. And what I overhear at work.
The amazing thing is that I don't feel in the slightest bit left out! I don't think I have ever been in a conversation this past 5 weeks when not being up to date with the news has caused me to look stupid. THe main reason has to be that the majority of Americans (at least my co-workers) were never reading the news anyway!

It also means that I have to stock my car with cassettes. I tried some of the local music channels but the commercials were too much of an interference.

Cock-fighting and fur

2005-03-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

Can people who eat chicken object to cock-fighting on the grounds it is cruel to the roosters? I am vegetarian myself and my contention is that it is no more cruel to kill a chicken and eat it than it is to watch two chickens trying to kill each other. I think it is illogical to say that chickens killed for consumption are "humanely" slaughtered as opposed to their trying to do each other in. To begin with, how can apply such concepts as humane to the killing of animals? And how is slaughtering a chicken by cutting its throat more "humane" than a chicken using sharp knives tied to its feet ripping up another chicken?

Do the people who protest against wearing fur also object to leather shoes and wallets and jackets and purses? Is it a pre-requisite to wear only canvas sneakers and carry a cloth bag when participating in a PETA demonstration against the wearing of fur? I mean, after all leather was the skin on a cow at some time.

Se*y

2005-02-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

There was a huge furore over a couple of songs about 12 years back in India when the "se*y" word was used? The one song was Govinda singing "Mere pant bhi se*y, Mere shirt bhi se*y etc" and the other was Karishma singing "Hi se*y, hello se*y kyun bole". The Govinda number was a poor remake of "Right Said Fred"'s "I'm too se*y for my shirt".

The Indian parliament being completely bereft of issues of national importance got involved and I understand got a special screening of the songs (or that might have been for Choli ke peeche) Anyway as an end result both songs were banned from the air and the latter was modified to say "Hi baby Hello baby kyun bole"

Anyway what I am coming around to is, the other day I was watching this new movie and that had (an undeniably catchy) number called "Teri kurti se*y lagti hai, teri kurti se*y"

I don't know if this song is getting a lot of air time back home but I am guessing that our own FCC isn't making such a big hue and cry any more over the "se*y" word anymore! The times, they are 'a changing.

PS I am using the * instead of x not out of any misplaced sense of propriety, just to bypass any filters you may have set :)

More movies and liking what you do

2005-02-18T19:28:00.000-08:00

I borrowed 13 going on 30 just so that I could have something to watch with my wife, who doesn't much care for heavy stuff like Eternal Sunshine or About Schmidt. The first few minutes were painfully /// to Mean Girls and then it generated into some kind of poor remake of Big. At least with the Tom Hanks movie he became someone who wasn't already there- Jennifer Garner becoming someone who already existed was rather bizarre. The missus didn' t much care for Ms Garner anyway.
Spiderman 2 was well worth it though at times Peter Parker's life was verging on the seriously tragic. I don't seem to like Kirsten Dunst though. I didn't like her in Drop Dead Gorgeous, though I thought the movie was a riot. I didn't like her in The Virgin Suicides which was another of those 70's nostalgia trips that I didn't quite get. I didn't like her in Crazy Beautiful and I didn't like her in Spiderman. Doc Ock was terrific!

Then we watched something called Sasneham Sumithra which I swear is a remake of or at least based on Rebecca. None of the websites that reviewed the movie mention this fact however. Why does Sai Kumar look and act so villainously? Wasn't he a nice comic turn way back in one of the Mannar Mathai (or Ramji Rao) speaking movies?

I wonder if all professional athletes and actors and performers like what they do? At least they are working in a profession that they thought they have a talent for and one that they chose voluntarily. It would be weird to think there are basketball players who hate playing basketball but do it for the money.
Do actors wake up in the morning and say to themselves "I wish I had followed my dad into the family grocery business?"

I wonder what percentage of people like what they do- I certainly don't. I would have liked to been a teacher or a writer. Which perhaps is why I spend time typing in all these thoughts.

Movies

2005-01-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

I finally got my Hollywood Video coupons. For some reason every 6 months or so I find in my letterbox 4 of these Hollywood Video coupons each of which entitles me to borrow 3 movies for 99cents each. That is about the only time I rent new videos, otherwise I wait for them to come to general display and then use BlockBuster's rent one get one free deal that they operate Monday thru Thursday.
The last time, 6 months ago I watched Mystic River and Mona Lisa Smile and Love Actually and a couple of other new(ish) movies.
This time I borrowed on the first coupon, AnchorMan, Mean Girls and Goodbye Berlin. I finished watching AnchorMan and am almost done with Mean Girls which my wife insists on watching with me. AnchorMan was not what I thought it was going to be, I thought it would be slapsticky like Old School, but it is more like serious farce, don't you think? All that stuff about dogs talking bear-speak and Luke (or is it Owen) Wilson getting both his hands hacked off. I thought the funniest line was "Bark twice if you are in Milwaukee"!

I wasn't in the US in the seventies so I guess I miss all the allusions. It was a funny movie though all said and done and worth the buck!

We are watching Nadodikaattu once again with my m.i.l. That is really farce for the most part and I think it is rather dated. Of course watching it brings to mind this imaginary era of innocence and simplicity and Mohanlal before he became a superhero.

Whatever was the appeal of NattuRajavu I wonder. The same cliches, the same attempts to make a catchy line like "Poda Mone Dinesha" and "Chummathe" and "Savari Giri Giri", this time it was "Kaaranam nee kuttiyanu".

Hating the Patriots

2005-01-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

I have a blind unreasoning dislike of the NE Patriots. I can distinctly place it to the time when Tom Brady got that most unreasonable call in his favour when they deemed he was trying to tuck the ball and so it wasn't a fumble. I was rooting for the Raiders in that game since I liked Gannon for some reason.
When NEP went on to beat Pittsburgh and the Rams I was really upset and most gleeful when the next year they didn't even make the play-offs. Imagine my chagrin when last year they not only go all the way but beat my local team, the Panthers in the process!

I will be rooting for Pittsburgh big time this weekend but in my heart of hearts I feel it is a lost cause. Bill Belichick is not going to let the same team beat him twice in a season. People say that Pittsburgh has the game to beat NE but the same people said that the Colts would prevail in the absence of Law and Seymour. Wasn't it weird that once the Colts lost all the analysts were like "oh it was bound to happen". Only Costas expressed some degree of surprise.

Atlanta might pose more of a struggle to NE in the final if nothing else because of Vick's unpredictability and even a brilliant coach like Belichick can't prepare for him.

Being a Fan

2005-01-16T14:36:00.000-08:00

I have been a fan of the Minnesota Vikings since 97 which is when I moved to Minnesota from India. I have been in NC now for a couple of years and continue to be a Vikings fan. I watched them play very poorly earlier today and lose. Watched would be an overstatement- my idea of watching is to switch off the TV every time something I don't like happens. This could be a 3 and out, the opposition scoring or about to score, an interception, any number of things really.
I really like to watch only if the Vikings are doing well, a performance like Atlanta's yesterday would be to my liking. Or then again I might decide to switch off 'cos it is a blow-out.
I follow other Minnesota teams too, the Twins, the T'Wolves, the Gopher football team. In 7+ years of fandom I have yet to see a championship between them- the 98 Vikings came the closest.

I think the last winner was the Twins in 91, so the sports fans of Minnesota are owed a championship of some sort- while not yet 86 years, 14 years times 4 teams (not including the Wild here) is 56 years of futility.

Natural and man-made disasters

2005-01-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

I was listening to a show on the radio last night, it was an interview of the director of the new movie "Hotel Rwanda". The show was succeeded by a newscast where, predictably, the lead item was the refugee relief operations in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and so on.

I got to thinking. The tsunami killed upwards of 150000 people. The big earthquake in China 30 years ago killed more than 200000 people. The cyclones and floods killed 130000 people in Bangladesh in 91. And so we talk about the power of Nature.
Between 1 and 10 million people were killed in Rwanda/Congo in 94. How? By other people. No natural forces here. Only man-made.

Owning a home

2005-01-02T07:27:00.000-08:00

I never had thought that owning a home would have so many attendant headaches just in terms of day-to-day maintenance. And my home is new, at least it was new when we moved in, it is a couple of years old now. The windows are dirty and especially show when the sun shines right through them and need to be cleaned. There are cobwebs on the high ceilings which I cannot reach anyway. The ceiling fan is starting to lose its white colour because of accumulated gunk. I have lost count of the number of places that need caulking. The garden is a mess and I need to stain the mailbox post.

Of course I do watch way too much TV.

A visit to the doctor's

2004-12-30T18:04:00.000-08:00

I had to take my newborn to the doctor today. We took him for his 2day appt yesterday and he weighed 5lb 10oz a full pound down from his birth weight.
We were convinced that the nurse had done a shoddy job of weighing, she seemed to be in a hurry and didn't really check to see if the pointer was level
I wonder why they have those antique-seeming mechanical scales anyway where you have to move two pieces on different bars and have to get them just right so the pointer is exactly level. Don't they have accurate digital scales?

Anyway the doctor told us that our son was jaundiced and needed a formula supplement. I am convinced that Enfamil pays this clinic to shill(?) their products 'cos he promptly gave us a sample of Enfamil (plus there is an ad for Enfamil on the back-page of the pamphlet that the clinic gave us, plus the pamphlet explicitly recommends Enfamil as a supplement to breast-milk rather than saying something generic like "formula")
And he told us to meet him the next day to check the weight again and the colour of the baby's skin. I asked the girl at the front-desk if I could be not billed for the next day's appt since all we were doing was checking weight and skin colour. She said I'd have to talk to the doctor.

So we go to the clinic again the next day and are made to wait for a full hour after the weight is taken (which is almost 5oz more than yesterday, seems imossible given that the baby spent more time pooping than feeding). The doctor spent about 3 minutes with us and told us that the weight gain offset any other concerns he might have had.
When I asked him about not charging me he said that I'd have to take it up with the billing department, but I wouldn't let go and he condescended to scrawly "Requests not to be charged" on that piece of paper we had to return at the front-desk.
He seemed po'd but so was I. Having to wait an hour to spend a couple of minutes and then to be charged for it... C'mon!

I am heartily sick of the medical system in the US. When I was working in India my company picked up all my medical bills and while I was visiting in my wife's hometown all the doctors were family friends and made house-calls and didn't even charge.