In the last eight years, I have successfully transitioned from crying at the sight of roadkill to casually commenting on it. Now when I see a dead deer or raccoon, I am thinking "Fresh Kill" or "Flat Meat" like I am about to pull over and decide which one to have for dinner! It still makes me queasy and I go quiet for a few minutes, but I think I am less sensitive to it now.

In some U.S. states it is legal and even encouraged to eat roadkill. Makes sense! Take just the fact that 1.5 million deer meet their end on the road every year in the US. It made me wonder if the homeless shelters could somehow take advantage of this ... perhaps with the help of the State Trooper Association or the Dept. of Transportation?

There are tons of recipe books and websites dedicated to roadkill --- deer, raccoon, skunk, moose, bear, wolf, dog, cat, rat, elk, armadillo, small and large birds, rabbit, turtle, kangaroo, opossums, some snakes and reptiles, and hold your breath... porcupine!

It was as though the entire zoo was let out on the road to be tattooed with tire threads! You could just look out your car window for some nature time (even if it is more morbid than seeing live ones behind bars) It explains why Roadkill Bingo is a popular game. It is a game played in the car during long distance travel. A piece of paper has a grid with 24 animals on it. Every time a player spots a dead animal the square with its picture is marked off. The first player to spot a sequence of five dead animals which are in the same row or column wins the game!

Roadkill undoubtedly is a worldwide phenomenon. But, I wonder if roadkill is eaten in all countries... probably not in India. I wonder what Indians and the non-roadkill-eating countries do with all the kill. Having read Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil recently, it seems logical to surmise that roadkill art is popular with taxidermists (I saw a few websites with beautiful roadkill art). Taxidermists could probably make a living by choosing to do just roadkill! I wonder what else can be done creatively... toys of course!





There are lots of roadkill toys. Some look disgusting, or creatively mean-spirited, but there are a few that are actually not too bad. There is even a roadkilltoys.com (!)

About five years ago, Kraft Foods was forced to kill one of their gummy products. Their Trolli Road Kill Gummies were gummy-animals shaped like roadkill complete with tire threads. People thought it sent out a very bad message to kids. I wonder what that bad message was! Especially give that New Jersey, which strongly lobbied against this gummy actually lets you eat roadkill if you have a permit. Why then do they think it offensive to eat fake roadkill?

It is the equivalent of letting you each a real human brain and banning the human brain shaped jello!

That also makes me wonder if there is protest against all other kinds of gross candy. I see several in candy stores. There are jello molds shaped like human body parts - heart, brain and intestines, candies shaped like eyeballs, sour gummies shaped like toilet plungers, bugs and worms, pigs pooping out candy. Is anyone protesting against them? (Not that I mind either way.)

One of my favor go-to comic books is Stone Soup's Road Kill for the Closet. FYI: It has nothing to do with roadkill. The comic is about a single mom bringing up her two kids. Living with her are also her mom and her recently-divorced sister who is in love with her neighbour! As simple as that. It is the most endearing comic I have read. Funny, heartening and absolutely lovable. Since the title has Road Kill on it, I thought now might be a perfect time to promote it. :)

I wonder if I might find this in my library: Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways

My comic compilation list (not arranged in order) is a work in progress. The comments are not reviews, just random thoughts they trigger as I think about them right now. Some day, I hope to spend the time and make more than just random comments. I am not feeling that level of commitment right now!

XKCD: Munroe calls it a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. I agree with the romance bit. I sleep with my husband on one side and a laptop with two stick people making out while speaking of taking dreaming in stride on the other. (Also read Jasoos Sampat: an XKCD inspired webcomic)

Dilbert: Scott Adam's blog makes an interesting read. He usually takes an idea or a bit of news and muses on it. It's mostly the kind of stuff that makes your mind drift away. Of course, his comic is nothing like his blog. For one thing, it does not indulge you in aimless thought. You read it and wish he wasn’t talking about your life!

Virus Comix: Verbal Diarrhea wouldn’t even begin to describe Subnormality. Winston Rowntree presents his observation of life, which is colorful and quite depressing. The only frills to his social criticism seem to be the dark humor he provides as he makes fun of our lives!

Questionable Content: I am not a big fan of toilet humor. For instance, I love South Park but I find the scatological bits off-putting. You might catch me laughing at them sometimes, but it's a reflex reaction that is not in any way indicative of my inner revulsion! Questionable Content too has some questionable content, but it looks great, has talking gizmos and is entertaining. It also makes me laugh as I think how funny it "could have" been!

AppleGeeks 3.0: It says "Apple" "Geeks" and is a webcomic written by someone with an Indian name living in Maryland. We are a match made in heaven. :)

MegaTokyo: I find now, unlike years ago, that there’s a complex plot that has been developed from what was once a gag-a-day type of strip. In a way, it pays homage to manga comics and online gamers! You pick up a lot of Leetspeak slang from it, like n00b and Pwned!

A Softer World: I have read a few photo novels, but mostly adaptations of popular films or TV series, like Battlestar Gallactica and Star Trek. But, this is the first Fumetti webcomic I read and is ridiculously creative. Not just because they use photographic art instead of illustrations, but the dark humor in this is reflective and real.

Alien Loves Predator: This is another Fumetti comic that uses non sequitur humor! It’s quite absurd and funny.

NightZero: Another Fumetti. Reads more like a novel or a soap opera! (Ok. Kill me!)

Dinosaur Comics: This is my most favorite geek comic! The interesting thing about it is that he never changes the art in the comic from one strip to another.. just the dialogue.. and the sheer variety of ideas that he has explored and culled into the same visual is brilliant. And then there is the clever humor in each strip disguised as being daft!

Diesel Sweeties: I am sad to say, the conversations in this remind me of mine with Tapi. Maybe if I show it to him, the time to come will see us speaking sagely!.. and how would that go! .. and what would that be!
On a side note, I also like the repetition of the same illustration in all panels of the strip!

PhD Comics: Actually called Piled Higher and Deeper! It’s a huge favorite among my friends who don’t relate to Dilbert yet! Their emotion rubs off on me a lot, cos I seem to relate to the strips dealing with procrastination. If you have been in school long enough (like I have), you can get out of school all you want, but you can’t take the student out of yourself!

Hark, A Vagrant: Each one is different from the other, but again when it comes to mean humor, they are all the same!

I am addicted to looking at the keywords that bring people to my website through google or yahoo search. You'll see why. This is my top five this week.

(This is a key-sentence!)

1. how many are so caught up in their "dream" that they fail to awaken to what is? to say this universe does not affect you is similar to believing you don't need oxygen... such an egotistical mind that is. i am no better, no worse, i am simply a soul in search of evolution

2. home procedure for growing of stage and beard

3. why’s there fuzz on a tennis ball

4. prabha mohan hyperion

5. Prabha mohan sings telugu nursery rhymes

This is very worrisome! :)

I didn't think it was enough that I tweeted about the new Safari. It is jaw-dropping awesome. Surfing the net feels like using the ipod or iphone and even better!

When ads say things like "seeing the web in a whole new way" or "providing the most enjoyable way to experience the internet" you don't expect to be bedazzled by an elegant and sophisticated interface, with SO many interactive features!

People keep throwing numbers all the time to validate their personal opinions on things. I find numbers persuasive, but they are not enough to propel me to take action.

On second thoughts.. instances come to mind when numbers affected me emotionally but I was paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem and didn’t know how to take action.

I remember the war in Darfur because it summons up dreadful images of violent deaths to about 500,000 people. That is almost the population of the city I am currently living in. AIDS currently affects over 35 million people in the world. There are about 40,000 reported cases of Swine flu in the world.

Perhaps, it is unfair to make a point about the relevance of numbers when we speak of something sensational like genocide or diseases. Their relevance mostly comes from numbers!

I have been reading amusing and distressing news stories related to endangered species in ecoworldly. Read this:

A species of bird so rare it was thought perhaps to be extinct was captured on video and still images in the Phillipines province of Nueva Vizcaya… right before it was cooked and eaten. Read more

Scientists succeeded for the first time in achieving the holy grail of conservation: bringing to life an extinct animal through cloning. For seven minutes. Read more

Last year one of the most critically endangered birds in the world, the Northern Bald Ibis, nested in Spain for the 1st time in 500 years. Terrific news has now arrived that a pair is nesting again in the same location this year. Read more

According to a new study, climate change could drastically alter 88% of the waters where dolphins, whales and porpoises are found. While some species may stand to benefit from the changes, the research concluded that one fifth of cetacean species could be lost forever. Read more

There are many more. If you have read this far, I highly recommend subscribing to ecoworldly. :) They have much more than news about endangered species!

As I read this kind of news every morning and become affected by it, I realize it may be the effusive way in which the numbers are relayed in these articles that makes me feel remorseful. Talk to me about something with a lot of interest, wax lyrically, even lose your sense of proportion, and I will listen to you. If you are convincing enough, I will act with you and become a champion of your cause.

That being said, if there is only one of a species left in the world, or thousands of people slaughtered in a distant country, what can I do to help! How about giving me action steps to take aside from affecting me emotionally with effusion!

I have been thinking about our sense of morality and where it comes from. It can’t all be a result of our individual conscience. It can’t also be prescriptive or based on long-standing custom through an institution like religion or the government. It has to come from a combination of blind-faith and skepticism, only, how they are combined varies from person to person. Which is why, some kinds of morality have changed over time, like our views on marriage or the way women are treated. And some have remained the same, like our views on murder and burglary.

Needless to say, there are those for who the question of morality is in a state of uncertainty, like war or abortion or capital punishment. But, we would much rather leave these decisions to the cat that is willing to bell itself!

No matter where our sense of morality comes from, it is certain to some degree at least that it has little to do with numbers. At least, our sense of right and wrong does not come from how many people agree or disagree with a value. Around the globe, over half a million people kill unlawfully every year. Does the vast number of people who take to murdering makes it morally acceptable? What we sometimes deem as deviant behavior are acts of millions of people! If our moral judgment tells us homicide is immoral, it is not because of how few people take to killing or how many people are killed. It has to do with how we define ability to empathize in another and how our conscience guides our sense of rightness and wrongness.

I am reminded of my ethics class in grad school in which I learnt of the many ways of looking at morality and ethics. It’s bewildering how much thought has gone into this area of study. As you learn about moral absolutism, relativism, realism, anti-realism and so on… where each kind is as convincing as the other, you realize that it is impossible to be right about anything, including what we now perceive as natural instinctive states of mind like empathy and compassion!

Added to that, as I read about the scientific studies on behavioral neuroscience, like how mirror neurons affect our capability to share our feelings and understand another's feelings, it makes me want to question why I feel morally answerable.

Could it be that we use these devices such as numbers and effusive expression to force a false sense of morality?

Death sites depress me, not because they deal with death and have sinister-sounding names like Death Switch, Slightly Morbid, or Legacy Locker, but because they take care of who has access to your online content after you die! I suppose it makes sense. A decade or two ago, matters related to death were a lot more straight-forward. You had some tangible personal belongings, that you could easily divy up among your friends and family. Even intangible assets - negotiable instruments, intellectual property and such could be easily passed on. The more assets you had, the more complicated it got, but on the whole, bequesting assets to an heir was less and less labyrinthine in each previous decade.
 
But, now given that much of our time is spent on the net, and we participate in confidential online activities that may (or may not) involve financial transactions, you have to think about who has access to you digital property, that is your online accounts and documents after you have given up the ghost! This is especially something of concern if you want to keep all that information private as long as you are alive! The net is littered with email accounts, blogs and social network profiles of people who are no longer with us and who have no one to claim their accounts. Their online life is there somewhere, lingering like a poltergeist. Who knows when they might show up and what they might reveal to the world about them! I am willing to bet there is millions of dollars in unclaimed money sitting on the net in many paypal accounts and such as I write about it! A huge waste of wealth!
 
If I were to make a quick list of all my online accounts that mean something to me, it would add up to at least 20. Tapi and some of my family already have the key to my online life. They are free to go into my email inboxes and read my email, tweet from my twitter, spy on my friends on facebook, edit all my blog posts and defame me all they want, whenever they want. It's besides the point that they don't do any of that despite such free access, except watching my netflix movies and occasionally messing with my queue. I suppose they have no reason to. I don't live that covetable life that they would want to experience vicariously through me.  But what this means is, I am clearly not the best patron for these death sites. My loved ones already have access to my online assets and don't have to wait till I've met my end.

But if, unlike me, you are that buttoned-up person, who likes to keep your online activity private, you may want to consider these sites.

Not just death, Slightly Morbid for instance, provides the same services to people who are in an emergency situation, like a serious accident or a natural disaster. Death Switch has an automated system that prompts you to type out your password on a regular schedule. If you do not enter the password for some period of time, it deduces you as critically disabled or dead, and sends out your pre-scripted automated message to your loves ones. This I find scary. It's a lot to put my family through by having them read my death letter when I am still alive! I also have accounts on sites that I've stopped using. I don't want them thinking my lack of activity on their site is because I have gone to meet my maker! But as far as they are concerned, I may very well have. It's all the same to them! I also don't want to have to keep proving that I am alive on "Death Switch", even if they let me set how frequently I want to prove it to them.
 
But, here is the thing. I am one of those people you don't like! My job requires me to spam people every once in a while to promote some of the excellent work we do in our organization. I am not about to tell you what I do for a living, and get dissed for sounding preachy. But, I deal with online marketing and I send out a lot of emails to a lot of people. 
 
Every so often I feel the need to purge my office email database off deceased people! It's a dodgy and depressing decision. You may wonder why I care that deceased people continue to receive my emails in their inbox. But, if someone has inherited the inbox of a deceased relative, I have found new audience to promote my cause (healthy living!), which for all you know is advice they need (especially if the relative passed away as a result of ill-health) or may be interested in (if the relative was an admirable advocate for healthy living) They may want to carry on the tradition and contribute to the cause or even pay a tribute to their relative for having gone through a difficult time or serving a great cause. In essence, they have inherited goodwill and good health! 
 
On the other hand, you want to be respectful and not spam a deceased person's inbox for ethical reasons! It's not the most wonderful feeling to think that there are people out there wanting to make money off you for having lost a loved one! It's a matter of perspective whether it is okay that death is such a huge business. But death is business to many. I can easily think up a hundred important jobs related to death that I am glad are being addressed. In the case of nonprofits, it is not even business, it has to do with passing on the legacy of serving a good cause.
 
Another reason I feel the need to purge my database is because, if an email I send out goes unread because a person is deceased, it throws off statistics on email performance, making it difficult for me to gauge accurately how many "living" people were inspired to act on the cause after reading the email.
 
When you work in a health organization, dealing with death is inevitable! But the fact that reading about death sites is making me think of how it will affect my work and not so much my personal life is really disturbing! What I find amusing is how much we take the whole religious concept of "life after death" to a whole new level! We seem not only to want to live on forever, but also control how we will the live and with whom we will live, after we've crossed the great divide. 

I got a full score in the Green IQ test, and license to get on everyone's case! bruhuhahaha!

The political compass test was quite provocative and interesting! It really made me think about how I see the country (US) and the wider world, what my attitude is towards the economy, how my personal social values and my opinions on religion and sex substantiate my views on politics! I thought the quiz was quite all-encompassing, and also liked that it was slanted or ambiguous at times.

It was challenging to choose between agreeing and disagreeing with each statement, but at the same time, I am glad there was no "i don't know" option, because I am prone to ducking difficult questions.

The underlying principle of the Political Compass is that political views may be better measured along two separate and independent axes. The Economic (Left-Right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run: "left" is defined as the view that the economy should be run by a cooperative collective agency (which can mean the state, but can also mean a network of communes), while "right" is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the devices of competing individuals and organisations. The other axis (Authoritarian-Libertarian) measures one's political opinions in a social sense, regarding a view of the appropriate amount of personal freedom: "libertarianism" is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximised, while "authoritarianism" is defined as the belief that authority and tradition should be obeyed.

Yay to personal freedom and also the network of communes!

The thing that scares me about moving out of our apartment eventually is all the books we have accumulated over the years. I am painfully attached to most of them, the memories they stir up, and the people they remind me of. I can't bring myself to give them away. But there are some godawful ones that I must get rid of, which too trigger memories, but sometimes there is some benefit to disremembering!

So I came across this fun website called Bookmooch that I am inclined to try. You log into their site and list the books you want to give away. For every book that you give someone through the website you earn one point, which will allow you to get any other book of your choice from the website that is listed by someone else! To begin with, you get 1 point for listing 10 books that you want to give away and three points for sending books out of your country. There is no cost to join or use the website, except for mailing the book. You can also maintain a wish list on the site, so that they can mail you the book of your choice once it becomes available!

What is interesting in addition to exchanging books is that you can donate points to charities that BookMooch works with!

Overall, I think it seems like a brilliant idea. It helps you get rid of bad books and narrow down your collection to good ones. It keeps books in circulation. It seems like an exciting and cost-effective alternative, if you, like me, prefer owning books to borrowing them from the library. It's passably eco-friendly! (not really). There is also that charity bit.

So there! I have convinced myself! I am going to be Bookmooching!

I have always been afraid of messing with batteries. There’s the thought that inside that little double A, there is a certain volatile substance that might just explode. But, all deep-seated irrational beliefs aside, I have wondered if there’s a way to revive dead batteries. Now, I don’t know the first thing about science – or the many manifestations of our physical world. So my question is based only on intuition. What could a battery possibly have that cannot be revived!

Every time I throw a dead battery into the trash, I am consumed with guilt and self-loathing and feel miserable for the rest of the day. So I googled “bringing batteries to life” and found an article that confirms my hunch! (did I tell you I won a physics argument even last new years with Anand based on a hunch? :D Even Miru and Tapi were against me! It was a terrible night! But victory was on my side)

The article says:

Bring Dead Ni-Cad Batteries Back To Life
Are you tired of having your Ni-Cad batteries that refused to charge and simply die?

So what do you do with them when they die?
Just throw them in the trash - which harms the environment?
Or just take them to a recycling facility for them to be recycled?

Well, here is the best solution, bring your dead batteries back to life that can save you a chunk of change - By zapping them!
Here is one great instructable, Revive Nicad Batteries by Zapping with a Welder. Of course, you will need a welder, and not many people has one... So I came up with this idea that almost anyone can build!

DISCLAIMER:
This instructable involves hacking a device that operates on 300 volts and can be dangerous if not handled correctly. So, I am NOT responsible whatever happens to you using this information.

I am tempted to try this, but am also skeptical owing to the scary disclaimer. Moreover the disclaimer on their actual “instructable” page says

WARNING:
If you get killed by a poisonous explosion it means you did something wrong.
Electrocution is a real possibility also.
Ask your parents how to not electrocute yourself with a welder.

Yikes! How can this possibly be ECO-friendly if it can kill me? (Unless, the idea is to eliminate humans under the pretext of recharging batteries and thereby save the environment! brilliant i say!)

and I was right. Batteries do detonate!

Side note: The instructables website looks pretty cool. I can see myself going there often. It has all kinds of resources for DIY projects. Great stuff!

Tapi and (therefore) I have become addicted to Vimeo. I don’t know how they do it, but I haven’t seen a single bad video on Vimeo so far. Even the animated films by students are on par with Pixar and Dreamworks… and display creativity on a level that’s beyond anything I have seen.

I don’t really know how they manage to keep their site free of movie rips or commercial videos, but the site only has user-created content and somehow attracts the best talent out there! The whole experience of online video watching is a lot more personal. 

Vimeo reminds me so much of Google. It’s the cleanest version of “YouTube” there possibly can be and has only the most relevant tools on display. This is really ironic given that I’d somehow expect the “clean” look with a Google product. Total bummer!

Moreover, the site has a huge inventory of superior quality video, including a lot of hi-def content. Watching it on full screen is a real treat.

Side Note: Don’t like Viddler. No can do. Sorry!

Discovery News never fails to amuse me! Take the Animals Section for instance. Today I read:

Ants Slack Off for Colony's Greater Good
Leaf cutter ants carry much less than they're capable of, research finds, but their small burdens turn out to be the perfect size for ants processing the leaves.

There might be a lesson in this for my colleagues, but first I need to prove to them that I am the processing ant! And then I will work my way up to becoming queen and hire someone to be in charge of ant colony optimization. ;-)

Zoo Animals Try Online Dating
Just like the digital dating services that pair up people, so-called studbooks are used to match most animals held in captivity. The databases containing information on sex, age and weight -- not so much about favorite comfort foods or long walks on the beach -- are used by more than 200 zoos nationally and some internationally. They're practically taking the place of Mother Nature in the not-so wild world of captive animal breeding.

Feeling threatened by this animal invasion into social networks, facebook decided to become friends with the enemy. They let you create profiles for pets using the dogbook and catbook applications. They even let animals tittletattle about long walks and favorite comfort foods, but it seems more and more like their human parents are doing all the tittling and tattling for them these days. Here's where I read about it: Facebook with whiskers

Jamaican Lizards Work Out at Dusk and Dawn
In a demonstration of reptilian strength, Jamaican anole lizards begin and end each day with a visual display that includes push-ups, head bobs and flashy showings of their colorful neck flaps, according to a new study.

The head-bobbing sounds doable. Tapi? :-D

Songbirds Duel With Duets
Some sweet-sounding bird songs may carry a sinister message.

My neighbors seem to be getting the sinister messages in my songs and not the sweet sounds! Hello birds, how about some tutoring on twittering this weekend!

American Woolly Mammoths Pushed Out Siberian Kin
DNA shows the world's last surviving woolly mammoths were born in the United States and the Arctic. Woolly mammoths from those regions displaced Siberian mammoths, causing the latter group to mysteriously disappear off the face of the Earth.

And thus began US imperialism. :O

Tiny Critters Survive Space (With No Spacesuit)
When it comes to surviving open exposure in space, a tiny invertebrate now stands out: tardigrades, also known as "water-bears."

Spacing out, we can do too. (With no Spacesuit)

I have been given the prestigious “Brilliante Weblog Premio 2008” awards by Sita and Suhas. With a lot of pleasure, I present mine to bloggers who make my day everyday!

Anil: for his abundant creativity.

Anita: for her outlook and latitude of thoughts.

Deepan: for his way of thinking

Sita: for her mad outbursts.

Sharan: for his simplicity

Soumithri: for his theories

Suhas: for his reminiscences.

Tushar: for his edifying features and line of attack.

Anand: for his writing. Even though you have stopped blogging, I give the blogger in you a posthumous award, with the hope that he will somehow come back to life. :-)

I have come to admire you all through your blogs. I visit yours everyday, so please don’t stop blogging. My day is less complete without it.

I was supposed to give this to 7 people, but since I am giving it back to Suhas and Sita, it is only fair that I add two more.

And now if the awardees will
1. Award seven other people.
2. Buy me any food or drink for this award, not necessarily a pitcher of beer. (Suhas and Sita, someday I will. I promise. Until then, if you will have a glass of milk daily, my employers will be happy)

I have been getting forwards with supposedly funny images that have left me feeling very disturbed. It is one thing to draw a cartoon making fun of another religion and another to find humor is someone's helpless plight. Some fo these images (exactly 4) are genuinely unoffensive... But funny?

I learnt today that there IS such a a thing as hitting the limit on the Netflix queue! After 484 movies, the company decided to put a stop to my movie adding madness. I was vexed to say the least, more so after I found out that they were harsher on me than everyone else whose queue limit is 500.

I went looking on the web to see if there were people who found this limit bothersome. Naturally, there were many distressed movie-buffs complaining about it. Where there is reason for distress, there are loyal habitual grumblers! :D But, all's fair in love and war (movies)? :D

Seriously, doesn't Netflix's queue limit feel like some random capricious imposition? A limit for limits sake? After all, it is only a database with a movie list. It's not like we are usurping actual DVDs.

Some more digging into this matter took me to this website which was absurdly shocking to stratospheric levels. HACKINGNETFLIX.com!!!! O gods of Kobol! Why?

The post on the blog said

Very few of us will hit the Netflix limit of 500 movies in our queue, but Ghandi's Lament posted the message you see when you try to add movie number 501.

You can get past this limitation by adding up to 4 more Profiles, so you can have a total of 2,500 movies in your queue(s). If you have 500 or more movies in your queue, you qualify for the NeflixFan 500 club. How many movies do you have in your queue?

The rest of the website is very interesting. I can see myself going there often. =)
If I stick around, I might even find an online petition somewhere there that I can sign to have NETFLIX increase this limit. :p

Anyway, whether netflix lets me add more movies or not, I have movies to queue up. I keep stumbling on really good movie lists of critics ballyhooing theirs as "must see" and those I must see. Excel, here I come!

My cousin sent me this link to the trailer of a film called "Sita Sings the Blues", by Nina Paley. The film is still a work in progress but the stills should give you a sense of the attractive visuals in this shadow-puppet style animation. Its 72-minutes long and narrates the Ramayana from Sita's point-of-view.


Considering how most creative interpretations of the great Indian epics go through a lot of scrutiny and ridicule and are rejected for making a "mockery" out of our religious sentiments, this film is a BOLD attempt! I am glad to see that there are still some people who are not threatened by standpatters and are willing to celebrate their interpretation with ease. Sita Sings the Blues is definitely funny and imaginative, and not one to adhere to the customary plot.

For one thing, Nina completely omits Lakshmana in this film. She felt that the length of the film was too short to accommodate Lakshmana and do justice to his character.

On her website, Nina talks about her vision for the film and says some things that I thought were particularly interesting. She says she can relate to Sita in Ramayana, and draws parallels between her life and Sita's, especially during the disintegration of her marriage.

Here are some excerpts:

[After the divorce], I desperately tried to move on emotionally, but I couldn't get over my husband. Why was my heart devoted to him, when he'd treated me so badly? My husband's peculiar behavior resembled Rama's: no violent explosions, just mysterious emotional implosions. Why had he frozen up? Why had he rejected me, when I loved him so much? Why, why, why?

The Ramayana doesn't answer these questions. It is as mysterious and ambiguous as life itself, which is why I came to love it so much. We never really know why Rama banishes Sita. Common interpretations resemble rationalizations and apologies: Rama "had to" abuse Sita to maintain the traditional order of his kingdom, in which the opinion of the lowliest man ranked higher than the life of any woman. As literature, Rama's behavior towards Sita makes no sense...except it's so realistic. It is the Ramayana's ambiguities that make it so compelling.

The Ramayana never answered why, but it assured me people have behaved this way since the dawn of time. Even the gods have these kind of relationship problems.

I came to love Sita for her courage and purity. How can I say this "doormat" is courageous? Because, unlike me, she never fears her own heart. Sita never apologizes for loving Rama, no matter what he does. Paradoxically, by loving Rama she defies him.

In my experience, when men reject lovers, they usually want "no hard feelings" - in fact they want no feelings at all. But Sita has feelings, in spades. When Rama in Lanka tells her to run off with someone else, Sita doesn't say "ok, no hard feelings, seeya." Instead, she is unapologetically devastated and angry - she literally goes up in flames. My interpretation of Sita's "trial by fire" is that her purity of feeling spares her death. The flames are her pain, and by feeling them fully, instead of repressing, fighting, or ignoring them, she emerges unscathed. To paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, that which doesn't kill Sita makes her stronger.

Sita also has serious chutzpah to end her life in front of Rama, her sons, and thousands of onlookers. When she takes off at the end, it's one of those moments when the divine and the worldly pull apart and regard one another with surprise and horror. Sita's final scene contains more delicious ambiguities: Is she hurting Rama by leaving him for good, or helping him by finally getting out of his hair? Is she delivering him from the shame of having a wife who - gasp - "slept in another man's house," or is she shaming him further by demonstrating her own purity, aided by the gods and Mother Earth herself? What a great story!

The Ramayana is world literature. Although regarded by Hindus as sacred scripture, the story is popular with South Asian Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and others. In other words, it is secular literature as well as religious text. And the Ramayana extends far beyond India, to China to all over South East Asia - Indonesian performances are especially famous. I learned that most of the world is familiar with the Ramayana. Only in the West is it any way exotic, and that is changing.

Obviously I'm not Indian, but the themes of inexplicable betrayal and heartbreak in the Ramayana are universal. American blues songs tell the same story. Reinterpreting the epic with my own cultural and personal spin carries on a grand tradition of retellings spanning millennia.

There are some more short animated film's by Nina Paley on her blog that I really enjoyed watching. They all have a social message and make quite an impact. Check them out!

Rotten Tomatoes changed their layout. They have pretty graphics and a whole new "polished" look but I hate it! Why change a good thing? Everything was fine as it was. You could get on a page and feast on a boat-load of reviews and read the cream of the crop ones first and then the regulars, but now with sortable reviews, everything's shoved to the bottom. There are lots of features that I don't really care about. The search is the worst! The links are broken and the whole thing is really difficult on the eyes.

I may like it eventually, but right now, with me not liking change in general, and the idea of having to readjust my rhythm - this fresh one is actually rotten.

------

A day later...


I'm gonna take back everything I said about the site being rotten. The new layout is amazingly well organized. It's growing on me. I love it love it love it. No complaints. I can see myself using a lot of these "search by" and "sort by" features to find movies that I'm actually going to like. =)

... now if only some of the links were not broken and things loaded consistently it would be as fresh as a mountain stream =)
but hey! given that it's still in the beta phase, it's all good!

Holy Smokin Moley! Pardon my ignorance, (and maybe all my posts need to begin this way), but I just found Google’s Book Search, a prodigious online tool that allows you to read whole entire books online for free. How cool is that!

So they say on their website (and I’ve bolded the text that you should read while imagining my jaw drop):

If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.

We've created reference pages for every book so you can quickly find all kinds of relevant information: book reviews, web references, maps and more.

If you find a book you like, click on the "Buy this book" and "Borrow this book" links to see where you can buy or borrow it.

Where do the books come from? Currently, we are connecting readers with books in two ways: the Partner Program and the Library Project.

My mind is running amok, like a mad bull in a china shop. This new information calls for a lot of changes to my otherwise unvarying online routine. I can already see it transforming my blog in so many ways. I am also thinking about how this is changing the literary business and what kind of challenges an all-encompassing online corpus such as this will face. I am obviously gravitating towards comparing it with online video libraries and the youtubes of the world, but that is a whole different monster.

I am (as expected) exploring other digital libraries that offer the same service. There are some that I have been (vaguely) aware of that suddenly look very appealing: Questia, Amazon’s Search Inside, iRead.

But I can’t even begin to fathom this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_library_projects

And when you are done killing time on my blog, try Game Design. It has a very good collection of fun flash games that are seemingly lame and harmless, but before you know it, your brain's switched off, you are staring blankly at a screen full of blocks and circles and turn into a mouse-clicking zombie. =)
And, if lame isn't for you, they have some thought provoking games that are equally absorbing. Enjoy!


Don't let the language options to enter the website fool you. Most of the games have no written rules, so it doesn't matter whether you enter through their Japanese site or Chinese site even. My link takes you to the English one. But, if you feel uber-dweebish go through the other language ones.

DEMO.FB.SE: Is a great website with very entertaining web campaigns.
Kid's Cold Aid
Bad Luck-O-Meter
Dream Kitchens for Everyone
The City is Your Stadium
DesignKlicks
Sherpa Cam Interactive Video
Who Killed Travolta
Freak Your Mind
Guitar Shred Show - Mr. Fastfinger
Lab
The Fan
How to Draw a Head
SlaveNarratives
Nike Women Rockstar Workout
Samorost 2
Try on a Floor
Red Tango
Totems
Viscosity
15 Letters, Inc. A great company that makes flash websites.
ESPN Bar Sports
Hulk
99 Rooms
Adobe Creative License
Flash tenth Anniversary
Bible Fight
AgencyNet
A.D.D. Jane
Arj and Poopy
Autoimmune
Bergmann Metallbau
Big Spaceship They create amazing campaigns (web and video) for big brand companies like Coca-Cola, Google, Adobe, Gucci etc and are totally into emerging technology and popular culture.
Grindhouse
Nike Air
Brakenwood Animation They make some really cool flash animated movies that are a lot of fun to watch.
Little Foot
The Yuyu
Brain POP
Burst Labs
The Great American Eat Right Challenge
Cicatriz Clothing - Summer 2007 Collection
Clara Collins
Code Red
Comcastic
Converse
Musical Theatre in Gdynia
Actionscript Physics Engine
DoFus
DQ Books
ORISINAL
Red Interactive Agency
finetune
Hope Garden
Royal Caribbean - Freedom of the Seas
GeeGuides - Children's Art Education
Get the Glass!
Nahir - La mia migliore amica
Gorillaz
Hamish Fulton
Havaianas
Paulo Coelho - Alchemist of Words
Hungry Suitcase
Gallery Incomplet: Flash Experiments
IP BILOXI
Javier Ferrer Vidal
Oban Star-Racers
Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils
Radiohead - creep(acoustic)
Nike Airmax
MoMA Contemporary Voices
Twinkle Twinkle
Adidas Y-3
Filmmaker in Residence
Nick Jr. Playtime
Nike Plus
Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus
Linerider
One Over
Organic Grid
Move the Crowd
Pjotro - The man with a musical suit
Plug-in Media
Tired City
Reisethel
Shiver.tv
Spiderman3 MP Game
Body Geometry
Taste for Health
Tazo
Teddies in Space
That Guy
The m5
The Little Fella
Toyota: Yaris
Unit9 is a company that creates very exciting online content for advertising and entertainment.
The Creative Mind
Send an Elf
Modernism
Vision Street Wear
WM Team
Words at Play
XR Nowe Media
Bendito

Discovery News never fails to amuse me! Take the Animals Section for instance. Today I read:

Ants Slack Off for Colony's Greater Good
Leaf cutter ants carry much less than they're capable of, research finds, but their small burdens turn out to be the perfect size for ants processing the leaves.

There might be a lesson in this for my colleagues, but first I need to prove to them that I am the processing ant! And then I will work my way up to becoming queen and hire someone to be in charge of ant colony optimization. ;-)

Zoo Animals Try Online Dating
Just like the digital dating services that pair up people, so-called studbooks are used to match most animals held in captivity. The databases containing information on sex, age and weight -- not so much about favorite comfort foods or long walks on the beach -- are used by more than 200 zoos nationally and some internationally. They're practically taking the place of Mother Nature in the not-so wild world of captive animal breeding.

Feeling threatened by this animal invasion into social networks, facebook decided to become friends with the enemy. They let you create profiles for pets using the dogbook and catbook applications. They even let animals tittletattle about long walks and favorite comfort foods, but it seems more and more like their human parents are doing all the tittling and tattling for them these days. Here's where I read about it: Facebook with whiskers

Jamaican Lizards Work Out at Dusk and Dawn
In a demonstration of reptilian strength, Jamaican anole lizards begin and end each day with a visual display that includes push-ups, head bobs and flashy showings of their colorful neck flaps, according to a new study.

The head-bobbing sounds doable. Tapi? :-D

Songbirds Duel With Duets
Some sweet-sounding bird songs may carry a sinister message.

My neighbors seem to be getting the sinister messages in my songs and not the sweet sounds! Hello birds, how about some tutoring on twittering this weekend!

American Woolly Mammoths Pushed Out Siberian Kin
DNA shows the world's last surviving woolly mammoths were born in the United States and the Arctic. Woolly mammoths from those regions displaced Siberian mammoths, causing the latter group to mysteriously disappear off the face of the Earth.

And thus began US imperialism. :O

Tiny Critters Survive Space (With No Spacesuit)
When it comes to surviving open exposure in space, a tiny invertebrate now stands out: tardigrades, also known as "water-bears."

Spacing out, we can do too. (With no Spacesuit)

You may be aware of the cyclone that has ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. The death toll from the devastating cyclone might exceed 100,000. To put this in perspective, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 consumed about 200,000 lives and Hurricane Katrina took about 2,000 lives.

About six million people in Myanmar are directly affected by this catastrophe, and the entire country is reeling from severe shortages in food and medicine. Current foreign aid is highly inadequate and slow-moving, partly because of blocked access to the country by the ruling military junta. Yet many international organizations are making tireless efforts to respond to this crisis.

I humbly ask for your contribution towards helping our unfortunate brethren in Myanmar if you haven’t given already.

I have compiled a small list of some international organizations that are working on the ground in Myanmar and providing humanitarian aid. While this is certainly no comprehensive list, you might find this helpful in making your donation.

http://helpmyanmar.blogspot.com/

Anand

Remember The HungerSite with a magic button that generates a cup of rice to the hungry for free? I always wondered if it was a prank. How could it be possible? But of course, it is. By clicking on the button, we are generating advertising revenue for their website, which makes it possible for them to donate a cup of rice to the hungry!

But even though the idea of helping without volunteering services or shelling a dime sounded good, it wasn't enough to make me do it. For some time, I set HungerSite as my homepage on the browser, and clicked on the button everyday before I did anything else. But soon, it got old. I didn't feel like it anymore. What was my cup of rice going to do!

Maybe I needed more value for the click, like a sack of rice instead of a cup. I most certainly needed something to boost my ego. I would have continued to click everyday if I had proof of people benefiting from it; if they met me in person or sent me a youtube video bowing down to me and saying Thank You. I needed something to tell me that I wasn't wasting my time. And not just that, I needed something to tell me that what they benefit from my click outweighs the effort it takes me to click everyday. Now, how is HungerSite supposed to do that? How much more easy can they make this process? They don't ask for money, they don't ask for services, not even time. All they want is a click a day.

Still, my homepage on the browser changed to Google. I went to The HungerSite only once in a while, when I felt philanthropic or guilty and now my visit is down to once every 6 months.

Over time, there were more click-to-donate sites on the web. In fact, this site called Daily Charity has a button that lets you donate to almost every click-to-donate site on the net in one go. So here's truly one site that does promise more value for a click. I can feed the hungry, stop breast cancer, plant more trees, increase illiteracy, prevent extinction of species … all in just one click.


Was that enough for me to do it? Not in the least bit. I needed more.

Recently, a friend's email to Free Rice roused my interest. It is a website with a vocabulary game. For every right answer to a vocabulary question, they donate 20 grains of rice to UN’s World Food Programme that distributes food in some of the world’s poorest countries.


Now, you may ask what English vocabulary and 20 grains of rice can do to the world. But I am told that they donate about 3,200,000,000 grains of rice (444445 cups of rice or 150000 pounds of rice or 7500 sacks of rice @ 20 lbs/sack) via this game every month.

What about English Vocabulary? They say, it will help you:

Formulate your ideas better
Write better papers, emails and business letters
Speak more precisely and persuasively
Comprehend more of what you read
Read faster because you comprehend better
Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
Perform better at job interviews and conferences
Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
Be more effective and successful at your job

Moreover the game is entertaining and has proved to be quite addictive so far. Tell me I fell for a marketing gimmick or that it is utterly disgusting that it took an entertaining game to provoke me to act, or even that what I am doing is not helping, but I just hope it sticks….. until something better comes my way that requires no clicking either. Some day, maybe fantasizing about a utopian world alone will do. But for now I will do good only if I am done good to!

I am just adding this post for my own future reference. When I log into my Blogger dashboard everyday, I read the "Blogger Buzz" for links to interesting sites on the net and other activities.
Since I've become a "wannabe Ecoist", these inspiring environmental blogs will keep me occupied for a bit.
There are so many methods to this environmental madness and I am still struggling to find mine. The more I soak up information on what I can do, the more guilty I am of my indifference. I have made a lot of changes to my life, from the way I live to what I do for a living, but my effort pales in comparison with the millions of environmentalists who have been doing marvelous things to restore our world and our ethical fiber.

Environmental Blog Roundup

In honor of Blog Action Day, we wanted to highlight some of the many Blogger-powered blogs that are focused on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. Want to see more Blog Action Day participants from around the web? Find them on Blog Search.

• Cleantech Blog - Commentary on technologies, news, and issues relating to next generation energy and the environment.
• The Conscious Earth - Earth-centered news for the health of air, water, habitat and the fight against global warming.
• Earth Meanders - Earth essays placing environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary issues.
• Environmental Action Blog - Current environmental issues and green energy news.
• The Future is Green - Thoughts on the coming of a society that is in balance with nature.
• The Green Skeptic - Devoted to challenging assumptions about how we live on the earth and protect our environment.
• Haute*Nature - Ecologically based creative ideas, art & green products for your children, home and lifestyle, blending style with sustainability.
• The Lazy Environmentalist - Sustainable living made easy.
• Lights Out America - A grassroots community group organizing nationwide energy savings events.
• The Nature Writers of Texas - The best nature writing from the newspaper, magazine, blog and book authors of the Lone Star State.
• Rachel Carson Centennial Book Club - Considering the legacy of Rachel Carson's literary and scientific contributions with a different book each month.
• Sustainablog - News, information and personal meanderings related to environmental and economic sustainability, green and sustainable business, and environmental politics.
• These Come From Trees - An experiment in environmentalism, viral marketing, and user interface design with the goal of reducing consumer waste paper.

— Graham