Brown Motion

Not mine but for my primary transport device aka the family sedan. Have you done this rather mundane yet insanely mind boggling activity recently by visiting the artisans responsible for this incredulous feat? Why so many adjectives you ask? I repeat - have you been to one of these excruciating events off late? I just did and let me tell you its not the fact that you will shell out what the dealer tells you to shell out to get a $4 oil put in your engine's innards (he has just quoted $40) but the agonizing waiting that happens before you see your conveyance again. It is perhaps comparable or worse to the labor related waiting in the delivery room of a hospital that a spouse of the male kind endures, not knowing when his significant other partner will discharge their creation on to the planet. The unknown is what scares most living people and this is a classic. First you walk in at the appointed time and walk to the service advisor (which is nothing more than a paper entr...

I am not much into ancient history and all (partly because who can remember things when there are so many things to remember - and oh there is always Google) but I was mulling on the subject of the tablet craze that has invaded civilizations today. I am not talking about the pills that people of all ages it would seem pop from Morn to Noon to Nite but another kind.. the electronic kind. Another blog can and should be devoted to the former tablets or pills.. So getting back to subject at hand - i.e. the handheld tablet. Since the days of Moses people seemed to have latched on to the idea that it was a cool way to view and share information. So it was from the commandments to the Egyptians who chose to also use stone and other material like animal hides to design new tablets and etch their most critical thoughts so others coming after them could glean about what these Egyptians were thinking. That perhaps could not be said of today's tablets. For one they are made of destr...

Temples to me serve a good source of blog worthy material. Just a realization this Sat morning. I have seen my fair share of temples large and small, monastaries, cathedrals and churches, even a mosque among places of worship and have come to realize that above all they represent a sanctuary to most folk from the maddening life on the street outside. It is a respite in the chaos of everyday life before it is their gateway to something esoteric. On a recent visit to a Hindu temple I made the following observations - 1. Priests - species who is devoted to a business transaction involving Archanas or special Puja's and vanishing right after; some can be seen loitering with no specific direction; some sit outside the little diety alcoves and hand out CA nuts as a prasadam - a holy bite size snack in the form of almonds or raisins or fruit; some will also be generous and provide b2c blessings i.e. from god to individual customers by settling a silver cup on the devotees head an...

Lets do a quick catch up over this (if quick fails then resort to next step), Lets catch up sometime (catching it down sounds horrific I guess), Lets touch base on that (why use baseball terms I am not at all sure), Why don't we sit down and discuss it? (really - sitting is going to aid the cleansing process?), and of course if that failed we can sleep over it (or you sleep over it and I will gamble the night away), Lets take a walk (now the birds can overhear), Then of course if all this twisting and walking fails - throw it out the window and start again!

What is good for the goose is good for the gander (take a gander - on what a gander is); Holy Cow (to see it used in the west where cows are far from holy is ironic); Doggone it (I am not sure what it really refers to - do dogs go away somewhere?); Cat with nine lives (another mythical mumbo jumbo that people use to refer to what I do not know); Horse sense (horses must have sense - sometimes more than humans I think); He is chicken or chickening out (when do chickens chicken?); Squirrel away your treasures etc. (why this particular rodent was chosen to be the metaphorical representation of hiding things I am not sure)

Not the title of a new thriller but buzzwords in financial circles. Why circles and not octagons I do not know. With the past decade constituting the gyrations worse than a schizo with attitude combined with parkinsons, common man investor has also had to deal with retarded commentary from pundits. Most of it made of non comprehensible lingo that includes terms like - Black Swan (nothing to do with ornithology - more mythology), CDS (another moronic acronym signifying something that no one really knows), MUNIS (not the saints of yesteryear India but something more esoteric), ZOMBIE banks (again no relation to a Stephen King novel or wild rivers), Headwinds (really - like flying a craft into the Bermuda Triangle - not sure if this too could be an octagon), Social Networks (many a cow has been milked with this idea but no one really knows what it means), Capitulation - sounds like something bad at the dentist's office

Not a Cambodian temple or a gardening exercise or a painful surgery. Rather the phonetic representation of an activity practised by some learned sage (not herbal but ascetic kind) for many a years. Something to be said about that. What Mown Wrat translates to is literally the 'art of shutting up'. As in taking a vow of silence. Yeah - that is hard. Could we use that in modern society? You bet. Once you open the trap and let it fly it is very hard often times to the detriment of the one espousing chosen epithets et al to retract what was said. From politicos to CEOs to colleagues at work to the grocery store and beyond we hear people yam about whole bunch of things with their points of view and other opinions. Most of the time what is coming out of their respective orifices is utter nonsense and exhibits traces of arrogance that we as a species have come to typify. As an example when a motivated speaker is talking about being green and taking care of our earth ...

After much debate on how to spend our few weekends before the not so little one had to go back to school we decided on visiting the central CA coastline since we never had a chance to spend quality time here. Many a trip we planned - we saw and we drove past - LA had taken up too much of our available time you see with all its lure. This time was different. We set out to exclusively book a property along the central coast and decided to hang the hat (no one really wears any headgear), our selves and our car for a three day weekend. We set out early Sat along the Pacific Coast Highway and taking in the scenery and slowly disappearing fog along the coast we stopped for brunch at Rocky Point. Set atop the bluff this restaurant was open for visitors and did not have many at that hour. Just as well. Good Eggs Benedict (not sure why the saintly name but they are good - esp watching dramatic cliffs and surf and grey pelicans making their precision diving for their own nourishment) ...

One sure way to recognize the passage of time or your own aging is to think about things that don't exist anymore. So here goes - corded telephone phone with a dial pay phones on the street typewriters VCR postage - I mean who writes letters? Mail man - what is that? Instead there's a slew of new inventions or problems to worry about- Spam - not the nutrition in a tin Facebook - more faceless than facetime and does not require any idea of what a book is Brain damage through cell phone use Crackberry addiction - new kind of berries that have made people lose all notion of verbalising thoughts instead typing them Sim world spend to knowingly own intangible things

Not a reflection of Parisian haute couture but a metaphor used by American business media airheads to describe the Euro Zone financial crisis as compared to their stateside brethren. It is funny to watch all the pundits come out in full glory and start lambasting each other when the American equity markets go for a tailspin. When we are fighting wars in any number of gulf nations these Euro folks are all the allies we can get but talk about economic malaise and Euro zone becomes a curse to avoid. Now it is interesting to observe from an ombudsman's standpoint that there is no room to stand and there is no point when the crowds have taken to the waves and shouted themselves hoarse blaming everybody under the sun for the state of the global economic slowdown. One moment China is going gangbusters, the next day they have hit the brakes so bad we can smell their rubber all the way here. Oh and Latin Americans, man those are crazy - not sure what is going on there - for a moment...