People may not realize but as a television audience, all Indians are spoilt silly and they still complain if the monthly cable bill goes north of 300 rs/-. Take other countries like US or UK and to get just the basic smattering of channels, you end up paying 30-50 dollars/pounds and close to a 100 if you want the full gamut of channels.

Anyway before all of you start getting flabbergasted about a post not involving football, now wait a minute, it is about football :-)

So, anyway an expat from UK (from a site I check out stuff on goes on a diatribe about being made to listen to the amazing pundits on the channels in US.

( His words of appreciation )

His final sign-off is something which I have been doing quite regularly. Waking up at 5 and 6 am on both days of the weekend is more or less a norm for me now. I plan to get some more sleep post May. He says,


Oh, and you also don't have to crawl out of bed at 5, 8, or 9am in order to catch a live football broadcast! That's devotion I tell you...especially when it's Newcastle v Pompey and it's nil-nil.
England's not that bad after all.


So the moral of the story is that crazy idiots in the US have to wake up at 5 am on a Sunday morning to watch football.

And folks, if you are the teary-eyed kind, do not click on this link

"(Yawn) And they are off" (it was a very great build-up to the start of the new grand prix season)

"DC seems to be running 5-6 secs slower than everybody. Must be a problem with his car." (They also seem to like giving nicknames to drivers).

After 10 laps of wondering why some cars that went into the pits during a yellow flag have not been penalized yet, they figure out that there is something called "pit lanes open".

"Woah - did you see that?" (the usual first corner melee with the commentators act as clueless as everyone else starting at the tube)

"Oh!" (and thats the end of the very descriptive statement

"Woh" (everytime a car loses a wee bit of control due to the lack of traction control)

"Thats a DQ" (go figure what that's supposed to mean)

"Woah! Oh my! Oh my!" (when Sutil crashes out)

And they wonder why F1 does not have any major fan base in the US.

Enuf said.

PS: One more thing: why?

Interestingly you have Zimbra and Google as gold co-sponsors for this year's foss.in. Am I missing something?

Well so it seems like I have bunch of interesting friends (well not that you were not interesting before I got your comments on my previous post). Anyway so anyone who knows a bit of English football knows the Special One as Moan-rinho. To everyone else, well, it seems that it brings about a vision of life after a man goes about kneeling down on one knee and submitting himself to have his ankle chained to a one-ton weight.

Well I guess that would not be the correct way to put it. A lot of people may get offended. After all, a certain someone does crack a whip and the poor guy does somehow manage to find the strength (a.k.a fear-driven adrenaline rush) to finish a 100 metre dash in 10 secs even with the ton of weight to fetch an inconsequential object. Hmm I wonder what would be an apt enough analogy with the chains and the whip

And I wonder if the man had to walk down the aisle, would the phrase have remained or would people be whispering about the poor guy walking the plank as he went past them down the aisle?

Warning: Take the stuff I write about with a bagful of salt. A pinch may not be enough.

It has been only a few weeks since the Special One was fired from his job and you just need to look at the sports news to see how times have changed. So Chelsea drew a match yesterday - no rants from their manager or any cursing of the referees. What is the most surprising though is that the news sites actually ignored the fact that Chelsea dropped points. Actually I doubt that they even realize that Chelsea exists these days. Heh - I wonder how many of their new found fans from the past couple of years actually hang around to support them by next year

On another note, I guess England do provide a bit of fun at the World Cup and Euro Championships. Its a pity that barring any miracles, they will not be there next year because of McClown.

And now to American sports, can anyone please explain to me why the hell would someone want to watch a game of baseball unless of course you are threatened with life-threatening dire consequences? Which I guess does not make sense as you are not likely to survive a game anyway.

So each year California seems to get hit by around 10,000 earthquakes. Most of them of course are so negligible in strength that you would not know about them unless you kept a careful check on the earthquake monitoring sites. At other times, if you are like me, you will wonder why your car is shaking so much when you are stationary at the signal and of course you will put it down to either some problem with the car - the engine, the tires - or did that dude behind you nudge the car? Oh wait, signal changed - start moving - hmm the car seems to be fine now - must have been something lets just ignore it for now.

So yes people, an earthquake measuring 5.6 on the richter scale (classified as moderate strength and very light damage) did hit the south bay area on October 30th evening PST. Thanks to teemus for checking up on me and letting me know that an earthquake had happened and surprise surprise that it was not a problem with the car. A small point to note was that it was followed by around 10+ aftershocks which no one noticed. TV channels scrambled to report the breaking news of the earthquake with moderate strength and no damage reports and let loose their army of reporters to go forth and "interview" anyone and everyone on the streets, restaurants, homes to find out what they were doing at the time and how they reacted. This had the unfortunate consequence of being televised back to you during the news report.

On a more sober note, this was the strongest earthquake to hit the bay area in quite some time. The previous earthquake stronger than this was well not as exciting to say the least.

So finally after a few weeks of no football on TV, I finally get to start watching it again. And I start with Liverpool v/s Arsenal. Now I all need to hope for is Liverpool getting out of it unscathed with atleast a draw

So everyone on LJ suddenly seems to be posting about books. Books they have, books they are reading or just finished reading or making resolutions on reading more books. And I am guessing that soon there will be a bunch or two of people who will be saying how they cannot read books and calling people who read a lot of books 'pseudo-intellectuals' :-)

So here goes a list of books I would like to buy and finish off reading by end of this month or so ...
(hint: if you have any of these, I would like to borrow 'em :-D )


( more books ... )
And yes, the Crichton book is available on the street stands given how we value being one of top-most countries with IP rights/piracy/copyright violations issues ...

Oh well, gone are the days when I used to start a book at 12 and continue reading till I finish at 5 am :-(. So, any suggestions on other books which would be a good read?

Overheard (actually spoken in Hindi and sounds more realistic so here goes an English version which doesn't the original any proper justice):

"It makes my eyes go all teary-eyed when I watch those couples go walking past affectionately holding each other's hand".

The answer to the obvious question :
"Well, next month, I will watch the same guy walking with a different girl doing the same thing."

So what would you have thought to be the most be-fitting answer instead of this one?

And people as much as I would like to take credit for that answer, unfortunately, I didn't come up with it.

Porto v Chelsea
Celtic v AC Milan
PSV Eindhoven v Arsenal
Lille v Manchester United
Roma v Lyon
Barcelona v Liverpool
Real Madrid v Bayern Munich
Inter Milan v Valencia

Why? Well, its 6 pm on a Tuesday Oct. 24th (a public holiday) after the day of my vacation and I am sitting in office.

                         is as well known as the value of pi.

What would you fit in there?

Enough of getting bored on weekends having nothing much to do apart from roaming around, eating out at new places, watching movies ... time to get back to slouching at home on weekends watching football all day long

Weekend Update:

Go ahead and read this article to get some kind of idea. But for the actual secret to bluesmoon's success, well only he would know I guess.

Originally intended statement: Is dystopia a myth?
Reality: In this day and age, one should not really need to wonder if dystopia is a myth.

If you don't take things in books (and their plausible hooks into reality) too seriously, then I would recommend a mixture of utopian and dystopian novels. Utopian ones are usually supposed to be all happy, smiling and ... blah! - well if you still want to try one - try Plato's Republic. I guess there will be more but never bothered to look. As for dystopia - a good genre to read - well there is 1984, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, ...

Oh yes, you could relate a lot of stuff in these books to things like kids gunning down other kids in schools, countries bombing the s*** out of each other and so on ... but try not to ... In any case, we always have our esteemed leaders to pass resolutions to condemn such actions every now and then.

Well, been a long time. 3 years over. They were over more than a month back but then again, what is there to write about? Some would look back at what they have done over the past X years. Others would look back at how things have changed over the period of time.

What would I think/talk about? ( Here goes ... )

Well, so bluesmoon gave a hint of the things that can happen when you combine football and women here. A well-known site for footie fans went even further:

The silly things women say!
More silly things women say!!
Yet more silly things women say!!!

Oh btw, one other thing, it would be very likely that quite a few guys will also fall into this category. 7 years back, I would have found that completely hilarious. Today, it's hardly suprising :-(. But that's a story completely unrelated to football.

Well, from tomorrow, I move on to a 9-6 job.