Bedtime stories

This is what happens when its 3am and I'm not in the mood to sleep (cos I woke up really late today). I was going to draw a comic strip, but after several unrecognizable sketches I finally abandoned the comic strip idea and settled on a bed time story. All the characters in the following story are fictional and also extremely sleepy.

Why cat-babies are called kittens and other stories
Ma Kat and Pa Kat had a small argument at the dinner table. Pa Kat wanted a puppy since he was a kid but Ma Kat was adamant. “Puppies make a mess, we’ll need a bigger litter and besides, I just read in the Cat Health Zine that cats with puppies tend to die earlier due to reasons not yet know to catkind. We could get a cat if you want”. Ma Kat was always a ‘cat person’. Pa Kat agreed and they decided have some babies. Pa Kat called up Kit Cat, the cat delivery system to order babies. “No, I don’t want the free shipping by stork baby deliveries. Yes, we will pay extra for the OoPS express shipping”, he said. Which was a good thing too because Large Beak, the CEO of Stork Delivery Services had once said “We deliver everything, but cat liver is really delicious, so we just love delivering cats and people even pay us for delivering cats. This is stork heaven”.

The OoPS guy brought with him a boxful of small cats. Ma Kat was a bit angry but Pa Kat insisted that he couldn’t have possibly passed over the ‘Buy 1 ,get 26 free’ super saver deal. Ma Kat had decided the name of the first baby and they called her ‘Kita’. The naming of rest of the kittens fell over to Pa Kat. Well, we know now that Pa Kat wasn’t very imaginative because he named the second baby ‘KitB’, the third baby ‘KitC’ and so on. All their babies became famous and number 26, KatZ, even started the 'Katz's Deli & Bar' in Austin, Texas.

This, however is the story of two of these, babies fourteen and twenty seven. Baby fourteen, KitN, went on to become so pouplar in the cat world that cats all over the world started naming their babies after her. Even today cat babies are often called kitns. When Pa Kat had named the first twenty six babies, he realized that he had run out of letters and still had a baby to go. However neither Pa Kat nor Ma Kat had seen such a chivalrous and brave baby like number 27. In fact the King of England (who had nothing else to do since the Queen did all the ruling work) knighted the baby on hearing about this. And hence number 27 was called Sir Kit which he often misspelled as Serkit.

Kitn and Serkit were inseparable when they were born. In fact they were Siamese cats and the doctors operated on them to separate them. However, they still remained close friends and embarked on all their adventures together.

How Kitn and Serkit helped the human doctors

Doctors all over the world have always wanted to look inside the heads of their patients. This is not particularly tricky, but patients often ran away when the doctors tried to cut open their heads. Serkit realized that cats had X-ray vision and could look inside the heads of most humans and examine their brains. The only exceptions were politicians and Kalifornia residents whose brains the cats could never find. (X-ray vision in cats was prohibited in Kalifornia for environmental reasons). So they patented the CAT scan machine which saved a lot of human lives all over the planet and made Kitn and Serkit the first cat zillionaires.

Longhorns 70 Buffs 3

This was the first college football game I've ever been to . And it was some game (though a trifle one sided).

With ten touchdowns halfway through the third quarter, I can safely say that we saw a lot of action.

We love the roses !

Apart from the game, we had a short ride in Houston's tram (or whatever they call it) and sampled some really great food at "Shahnai".

The stars and the mountains

Thanksgiving weekend.

We had gone out camping in the Guadalupe National Park. It was fantastic. And an eye-opener. If you forget your tent, and sleep under the stars with only the wild howling winds for company (along with a couple of friends pissed off at you for forgetting the tent), your eyes will definitely open early when you sleep facing the east. Anyway, sleeping without the tent wasn't too bad (since we slept for only 4 hours) and gazing at the beautiful mountains while you wake up, sure beats that irritating alarm clock I have.

Carlsbad caverns. The photos don't do it justice.

The third leg of our trip was the McDonald observatory near Fort Davis. We have been planning to visit that for a long time, since Tanmay and I went to Big Bend in September. The sky from that area is awesome and they have a really nice starparty too. (This is the first time I saw the dumbbell nebula, M27). Looks nice !
Definitely worth another trip.

For a more poetic description of the trip check out Sundar's blog entry.

First Post

For a long long time I was debating with myself (I do that often, that way I always win the debate) whether or whether not to start a blog. I thought about the pros and cons of having my own blog.

Cons:

1. Nothing interesting to post
2. Could take up a lot of time
   
3. No one is going to read this anyway.

Pros

1. Could take up a lot of time, that would have been spent doing useful stuff
   
2. No one is going to read this anyway

The title of this blog, The stinking dragone, is a metaphysical attempt at understanding the underlying nature of matter and energy. Now we all know that (at least those of us that come from Mumbai) that Energy is a delicious milk drink that is sold at all railway stations. Matter however is a totally different matter. I guess I'll skip the further details, but the bottom line is that if you think that the top line says 'The Blogging Dragon' instead of 'The stinking dragone' then you and you alone (who else is going to read this crap) are the Drag one.

My next post (coming very soon) is on my recent camping trip to the Guadalupe National Park.