Brown Motion

I guess now that we have seriously spent some years planning for our future and that of our child - from tax planning to health management to education it is time to start an official compilation of things to do before - 1. I and my spouse kick our respective buckets (need to research this reference to the dowdy container before the kicking occurs) 2. Europe collapses into civil war, 3. United States is morally and financially bankrupt and owned by China - entirely, 4. Australia once again becomes an island where they send all your lepers, cancers, with all the aids needed to expire, 5. India stops exporting and importing or doing pretty much anything because there are so many people there that no one can physically move to do anything, short of pushing people over the border to Pakistan which by all accounts has imploded a few years prior due to a similar situation (reminds of a poignant ad campaign back in the day when they showed few tomatoes being squished in too small a bottl...

Specifically those meant for use with hair - human hair. Yes - the Lever, Gamble and Proctor families will have their goons looking for me again but the truth shall set me free or something. To this day I stay confounded. Hence I have never purchased one. Perhaps the kryptonite, I mean keratinite in my hairy mass has some unique qualities inherited from the lowly follicle they arise from as I never had the need for my hair to be conditioned. I mean soaps or detergents I maybe get. You have some germs or grease or form of debris that you accumulated from the 'day in the life of' that you need to rid off before getting to bed. A good lather created by a surfactant (key ingredient of a lathering agent) will aid in removal of such detritus. Shampoos too are a stretch but maybe plausible given the need to get into the strands of hair. As such it is nothing more than a liquid soap. But then comes the mysterious cousin to all this - the Conditioner. Taking a page from an ai...

As I chew on a bowl of Skittles (I am chewing the candy not the bowl) I realized that among 'these are a few of my fave things' these hard on the outside, soft inside, fruity calories do rank up there. Then I decided to write down my all time favorite candies so I could go and look up the names as I continue to mature ('age' sounds harsh so in the euphemistic spirit ..). Of course it is entirely another matter if I will remember having a blog. With the rate of my consumption of sweet calories my date with the bucket could be round the corner...but until such time the other mouth blasting wonders I have consumed include - MARS Almond Nougat bars, with all that almond skin getting stuck in the nasty cavities notwithstanding. Toblerone bars - can you imagine a triangular prism entering your mouth at any angle? It is actually fairly dangerous yet the taste is addictive...I have had 10 of the tiny ones or an entire large size bar at one sitting in spite of bleeding fr...

Of all the ridiculous things that make it in the news Starbucks got into 'hot water' when some interest group found out that they are using beetle juice to add color to the pink concoctions sold at their outlets. Now beetle juice to a ghati or desi of certain persuasion might mean the deep reds left to dry on railway stations or public spaces where an errant truant has used the space as their personal spitoon. This after chewing on beetle nut and calcium powder squeezed between beetle leaves. What the largest coffee company resturant got into trouble was the actual use of the bug - not the car - the critter, specifically its ground up extracts that have the ability to lend a pinkish hue to the beverage that contains it. Frankly all the moronic people that want to consume the IT brand run the risk of consuming a hitherto unknown quantity of chemicals or substance which is what makes it new and unique. But we do not know this when we buy and now want a piece of the action ...

I know my all time favorite comedian once explored this deep subject of how society would look like if we all said what we wanted, when we wanted. Just blurt it out like Cosmo Kramer - as soon as the thought entered our medulla (or is it the hippocampus - can never get it right). Politically correct or PC has become another bane of modern society in that a lot of work never gets done as people are busy trying to appease all those that surround them - at work - in schools - on the phone - email - et al. Those that are shrewd in this so called art move ahead in their social, business and facebook lives I perceive. However it also leads to the puzzle of figuring out what genuine really looks like. Motive and action are not necessarily congruent in modern life and depending on cultures, geographies and circumstance people have become adept at using new fangled terminology to convey their thought. It has also given rise to a whole new lexicon to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. ...

Several times a day we are now reminded how anal the world has become. By creating various ways to be more efficient and digitized we have also awakened equal number of Hydes that only end up helping the humans design a more complex lock with more passwords that will soon include the need for us to learn the cyrillic script - since anyone can hack a latinesque key. Just this morning as I tried to update a blog the Captcha key popped up to make sure I was not a whack job computer algorithm trying to spoof an entry in and make some untoward comments or worse hijack the blog and cause a world wide panic. Airports worldwide have taken the terrorism threat to mean different things to their public and implemented a non consistent and bizzare array of procedures to thwart people from carrying all manners of fluids or solids on to planes. The embarkation or getting to the gate itself is an exercise in undressing to varying degrees depending again on the whims of the policy makers and the a...

Watched a rather long winded first of three, book to movie incarnations in 'THE GIRL ..' series. Was not sure what it might be - the name intrigued me - 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoos'. Honestly I had low expectations going in to watch, what with having seen many a housewife consume the hard cover ed many months ago when those came out. It was flying off the local store shelves. Hmm.. the movie though whatever the book might have been is actually a fun whodunit showing intrepid flamboyance with dogged cunning destroying a mentally distrubed nutjob. The movie is Bond-esque thrills and techno mumbo jumbo crossed with good old fashion gumshoe journalism. The latter is the alter ego of the author Steig Larsson who was himself involved with research, tracking and exposing of neo-Nazi and fanatic cultures. It also features the current Bond incarnation in the form of Daniel Craig playing the protagonist. The young newbie, (to me anyway) Rooney Mara is "the girl ...

1. iPads are hot - literally this time - throwing out more heat than their predecessors - could double up as a heating pad so sales have quintupled 2. Hillary Clinton noted that the world is going to run out of water - real estate glut stateside now turned into a new frenzy with people with cash seeking vacation properties and second homes in the cold Arctic and Antarctic (at least they will have water) 3. Ex Australian tycoon chose the royals to mess with - end result - Newscorp got in hot water 4. Etch a Sketch was hottest toy - political competition made the precursor to the modern iPad an accidental winner regardless of who gets the GOP nod - battery lasts a lifetime - or at least till your thumbs fall off

It has been a mild winter this season in Northern California. Mild implies less rainfall than usual and mild temps compared to past few years. That is putting it mildly. There is a palpable difference just in a couple years when certain flowering cherry trees in our backyard did a zero to full bloom in 2 days flat - 2 months ahead of schedule. Not entirely sure but perhaps the earth is spinning out of control. At this time we will soon find ourselves facing the possibility that the north and south hemispheres will switch places...actually the hemispheres will do no such thing but the earth might just as soon do a 180 degree flip. Quite confusing as confusing can be as Thomsons would say in my fave Tintin series (Saw that Spielberg directed incarnation recently - not half bad). It takes several degrees of warm up after all to cause the earth to misbehave and then all the degrees go topsy turvy in a manner of speaking.. I for one could care less what the physical weather is doing...

Watched a sci fi flick called In-Time. Intention was to kill time till the eyelids drooped last night but au contraire - we were wide awake as the plot unravelled. This is about a not too distant world where the only currency that matters is Time. How much you have left to live by? You either 'come from time' in which case you live longer or you come from the ghetto (not sure why the antonym of 'time' was chosen as ghetto - perhaps easier for the American public vernacular to process?) and had a negligible life span. Engaging concept to a loyalty marketing practitioner like myself to comprehend. The available currency or bank balance so to speak is displayed as a green lcd on the forearm of every individual. It is to be protected at all hours and minutes (time that is). So everyone wears a full sleeve garment not wanting to reveal - you guessed it - their true age. Everyone gets to 25 years through good old biological miracle and then aging stops. Grammy als...

Ever wonder what happened to my 8,932 miles on Podunk Airlines? Or those 5,331 rewards points on that ridiculous hotel chain that I thought I was going to be loyal to? I will tell you exactly what did happen. It got converted into smelly papers. Smelly what? Here is the scoop - Americans love to carry cards in their wallet. These cards belong to variety of clubs and super markets and airlines and hotels. Every aspect of daily life has a fan following or so it would seem and then as more and more businesses try to grapple with the same set of people they keep offering all of these people some ridiculous reward after another. I am of course referring to the ubiquitous rewards for everything culture that has come to pervade modern society (esp in the US). As people consume copious amounts of that new non fat yogurt or extra creamy gelato or fill their feet into that newest sneaker sensation they earn those extra bonus points. These collect in various impossible to remember bucket...

Get this hankering for good street food from Bombay every once in a while. There is a solution to the problem now - sort of. A couple from Mumbapuri trained in the fine art of butchering and skewering and mixing and frying set up shop in a burb in Silicon Valley. Place is called Mumbai Chowk - meaning the town square from Bombay - an unassuming location in an even more unassuming stretch of strip mall like those that invade all of suburban America. This one is on the once edge of the bay where the marshes met land. It is in a town called Newark..yeah we got one on the left coast too. It too is populated by a lot of creatures from the Indian subcontinent and esp those that get that hankering once in a while. So we researched, we mapped, we came. The familia that is - for lunch. We sampled a bunch of things from kababs to Pav Bhaji to Hakka Noodles. Pot Pourri of the street foods and it was meager to sumptuous depending on what you ordered and tasted from titilating to party in...

As man tries to outsmart those that came before him (holistically speaking) and invent new ways of doing old things he also concocts terminology to boast - Below are some such samples which to two bedouins in the desert (even today) or two romans sitting by the fire in 1 AD may have sounded meaningless and even borderline retarded.. 1. Work Life Balance - To the nomads the only balance in question would have been the one that dealt with keeping themselves erect after a night of drinking revelry - balance too would have been a pushover - after all if you fell down you could always wake up the following day and continue to pick berries..no one is going anywhere 2. 24 x 7 x 365 - Europeans and Asians and South Americans and Australians and Africans probably still have a hard time comprehending what this really means - even in the 21st century 3. 21st century - to people in the early ages it was not much of a subject of dinner time conversation since - for starters - there was no 2...

My wife oft asks of me as we get to bed every night. I got to wondering why it is that we are so beholden to this alarming idea that seems to invade our sense of being kings of our domain. Could it be that we are all moving like mechanised automatons and really pushing through time wanting to chase a sequence that we ourselves were responsible to write? Or are we expectant of a proverbial bounty at the end of the time rainbow and not want to miss it lest we slept in? I think we have just lost it. We have invented a world for ourselves where the material chase has consumed us like an addict on crack and we will do everything in our living power to continue to fulfill our desires - some negligible to some truly outrageous along the way. There are now millions of these - Alarms! From warning us of passing time to detecting all manners of gases (those that cannot be consumed for healthy living) to all the kitchen appliances that warn and beep and tink to alert you to that cake that ...

People are more obese today in general than they were 100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 20 years ago. How you ask? Look at the national headlines stateside and the all out war against obesity. At least that is what certain portions of the media and government would have you believe. No more fries and pizza in school lunch menus (except when the kids can go across the street and indulge in gross candy from an authorised shack); banning of fizzy drinks and soda dispensers from elementary schools etc. along with proclaiming sugar as an addictive narcotic toxic substance. So we have the obvious irony of living in the world wide lands of plenty (Africa excluded) and countries and governments simultaneously dealing with issues of Type II and other types of diabetes and multitudes of diseases linked to overindulgence in rich food content. Aside from this bizzare fiasco there is another factor that is becoming noticable in terms of so called advancing civilizations and that is the other ...

Disclosures: 1. I cannot remember the last time I spent money on a product or service due to its advertising impact (exclusive or marginal). 2. I am not most people in that I am brand agnostic. Most people must succumb to the constant barrage of advertising that surrounds them not unlike the captives that come to sympathize with their kidnapper during a long ordeal. This is perhaps the trick that large and small brands use in today's brand crowded marketplace to move their wares. If you really think hard you realize that 99.9 % of stuff sold on this planet is a commodity. There is a lot of it and it can be bought and sold at any time of day through multiple channels. So stand out in the insane crowd major corporations to small businesses spend serious change on making a smarter (or so they think) megaphone to yell the loudest. Be it by way of outdoor (ads that adorn variety of billboards to urinals) to print to airtime on radio and TV and the internet. Then there is the pop ...

There are more loopholes than there is fabric. Every year Uncle Sam (which is another goofy americanism that I need to research) comes knocking the door come April to collect taxes from the denizens that earned income in this land. This whole process of collecting revenues from the masses is bunch of crock aimed again at providing jobs to the otherwise moronic public. Try dialing the IRS call center for help - their skill is in googling your questionable keyword and providing generic garbage answers. Again job security and useless infrastructure for supporting the economy. My suggestion is this - why bother with all this mumbo jumbo infrastructure of having citizens file anything? Just deduct a set % from paycheck based on what a person earns in that paycheck. You earned a $100 we will take $20, thank you very much. End of story. What is this after thought of having people go back and review the whole year and then decide if they paid enough taxes or whether they feel up to pa...

Not Steve nor the political rhetoric that is rampant during times of elections (and otherwise - because you can only sell same sex nonsense for so long) but really the theory of what a job really is? A job is something that requires specific intervention from man or machine to complete a task. This task could be as inane or meaningless as updating a facebook page or serious like replacing a person's heart valve as it sits opened on the operating table. Now I have proposed in some of my previously completed tasks about my inability to comprehend various jobs or reasons why they exist. Here I try to build a comprehensive compendium for lack of anything fruitful to do this Sat morn. 1. Weathermen and women 2. Traffic update providing cretins 3. Air hosts of all kinds (they being far from hosts should be immediately disposed off and the term removed from our lexicon) 4. All manners of wait staff (if an owner so desires then restaurants can offer a handicap friendly service area fo...