A short story - Part 1

The peas of fiction

Chapter 1. ED

The calendar said January 1st, 1998. Antigravity cars, intergalactic travel, automatic lawn mowers, polluted skies, Duke Nukem Forever, automated response systems on phones to irritate callers; they had it all. Actually, it was year 2198, the evil dictator hadn't bothered changing the date on his desktop calendar. It did not matter much because he couldn't read anyway. The only reason he treasured that calendar was to remind him of the one incident that shaped his life. He was, but six years old, when someone had hit him on the head, hard, with that calendar. He had always been evil but by a freakish twist of fate, the hard knock on his head rewired his brains and he forgot the alphabet they had drilled into his mind.

Now, for some one as evil as he was, his career options suddenly diminished. Everyone had always expected that he would be a school teacher or a sys admin or even a peace activist (yes he was very evil). But what was a peace activist who couldn't write catchy slogans like "Stop wars, Eat organic oatmeal". So his career counselor told him that he had no choice but to be the evil dictator. It wasn't a difficult job, waking up at 10 in the morning, kicking his cat, execute a few innocent people, start a war (or two if he was feeling productive), eat non organic oatmeal to really rankle the peace activists (yes he was very very evil). Life was good.

Until, one day, she arrived. She walked down the stairway of the space ship, tired after the long journey. She flew economy by TheMerican Airlines and the airline had recently installed new seats with cattle prods near the armrests for economy class. This practice of torturing economy class passengers was a tradition that went back more for more than 250 years. In the ancient times, wise men called CEO's and ergonomic interior designers gave the problem a lot of thought. Initially, they decide to use the small hen coops for the passengers. They soon realized that was too comfortable and then, in a stroke of genius, designed the economy class seats we still use today. The design of the seats was ingenious and evil, worthy of the evil dictator himself. The problem with that was a mad religion freak called Darwin. He predicted that human kind would evolve and humans dutifully obeyed. Successive generations were no longer bothered by the seats and that forced the airlines to come together and come up with a new plan in what is now called the 'secret meeting of 1990'. They decided to continuously 'upgrade' the economy class seats to prevent adaptation by the species and get around the entire survival of the fittest thingy. Some of the legendary ideas were forcing dark cold bitter gooey liquids down the passengers throats when a passenger mentioned coffee, forcing passengers to watch Hollywood flicks (that was soon outlawed as inhumane). Anyway, the latest trend was the cattle prods that stunned you once every five minutes unless you made a slight motion (which you couldn't because of the well designed seats). Anyway, the point is that it was bit of an understatement to say that Leela was a little 'tired' after her flight.

Leela landed in Austin, a long distance away from the capital of the Evil Dictator in Tuttle, OK. Little the evil dictator, or ED, as everyone fondly called him, know then that this seemingly ordinary girl from Baloney Centuri 2 was visiting Earth with a single, irresolute aim, to end the reign of the ED forever! No, the ED hadn't killed her parents, destroyed her planet, banished her at childhood or stolen her cereal. In fact, she had no idea that the ED existed until a week before when she saw his evil photograph in the travel brochure.

Baloney Centuri 2 was first colonized by mankind two hundred year ago. It had virtually no contact with Earth or any of the other human planets except for the annual TheMerican Airlines spaceship which brought UPS deliveries, sliced cheese and oatmeal to the planet. No one ever left Baloney Centuri 2 and with good reason. Baloney Centuri 2 had a great climate, no broccoli, plenty of water, 3 suns , 5 moons to keep the astronomy freaks busy and everything except for sliced cheese and oatmeal (which came from earth as part of the 3000 year contract between Earth and Baloney Centuri 2).

Chapter 2. Leela

Windows XP boots on a Mac ... finally

It has been more than a month since the Mactel machines were released and now, finally, someone has been able to do this.

And it is not a hoax(at least I have no doubts on that).

Colors

Last week, I was just driving around Austin when I saw this house (and the car). Luckily I had my camera with me.

Also offtopic, the recent cartoons on userfriendly are quite funny (where they try to sell a 'cold swap power supply' ). It reminds me of the recent wildfire of keywords; AJAX, Web 2.0 ...

Coffee: The Vietnamese way

Inspired by the coffee at Pho's on Burnett (near PRC), I got a Vietnamese coffee machine of my own from the local oriental supermarket. The recommended coffee is not some exotic blend which needs to be roasted exactly 13 hours before being ground, but a generic can of a chicory mixed (stale ?) blend, Cafe Du Monde.

Add a dab of sweetened condensed milk (no evaporated or fresh milk) in cup, put a few tea spoons of coffee in the stainless steel thingy, compress the coffee, add hot water and let it drip. And you have a cuppa Vietnamese coffee to savor.

This is also very similar to how coffee is made in South India (Madras coffee) and not surprisingly, it tastes quite similar to it too.

Photo post

Caption: Simple colors
Location: UT Austin

I sort of liked this so decided to post it here. Selectively colored using Gimp (I'm not too inclined to spend $600+ for Photoshop). Comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

Golden sunrise

It has been a long time since my last post. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then (I mean, I think so, the river might have stopped flowing for the last month and a half so I'm not really sure about the 'lot of water' part. In fact I dont even know which bridge I'm talking about).

There were a lot of noteworthy incidents in the meanwhile ... I tried skiing (and falling down) in December, UT won the Rose Bowl, the badly officiated superbowl, IE7 beta 2 being released, GTalk being added to Gmail (though the chat in browser isnt enabled for my account yet :( . I truly fail to comprehend why they cant roll out products to everyone at the same time; or least include me in the first lot) ...

Anyway, amongst the really rare events, I woke up before sunrise (and no, there wasn't any pending deadline looming over me) and decided to enjoy the golden sunrise in Austin.

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.