Halloween sports
Was browsing through the internet when I came across this compilation of the Ten Most Feared People in the world of sport by FoxSports
http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/5013876?GT1=7127The number one on the list came as no surprise.It just had to be..Tyson!Like how the author of the article says..who would take even a million bucks to be in a ring with him after knowing what his favorite snack on the ring was?Inzy came third although I was under the impression Shoab Akhtar deserved it better but what the hell do I know about cricket!It was also quite interesting to see a woman (Jeanette Lee aka the Black widow), a pool player strike terror , or rather devour her opponents in her game
But the one player I adore and equally hate at the same time is a competitive eater,Takeru Kobayashi who has a record of eating 59 hot dogs in merely 12 minutes!!And guess what he weighs.. a paltry 131 pounds.Holy cow! I had always been jealous of Jughead Jones of Archies comics for being skinny inspite of a voracious apetite but was under the consolation that he was just a comic character and here he is, the too good to believe personality all alive and in flesh and blood.Drat...this is sooooooo not fair.So where does all the food he devours head towards??? Beats me!
And God said....guess what I did?
A T-shirt I bought at MIT said this and what a converstaion-starter has it been!
People at the registers at every store I went to would go agog with questions...so what do they mean? Can produce light if I used them?Looks like it was tailor-made for you(so I look like a nerd now???) So whats your major...theatre(with a wink)..yeah right, exactly!
I love T-shirts with wisecracks...but I almost never seem to find one for myself.Some of them which I would have loved to have are:
Procrastinate- now!
I am out of my mind..please leave a message
Stop reading my T-shirt!!!!
Your life depends on your dreams....so go to sleep...zzzzzz
and the ones I surely detest but which are very much in vogue are:
My boyfriend's outta town
Too hot to handle
and sadly those are the ones I keep coming across at the Mall.....
And its back to yellow again
Boring yellow is the color of the 'A' on the mountain again....unless I plan to do something really crazy this Friday night....hmmm...I better stop get ideas with midterms around the corner again!
BTW, did anyone check out Suriya on Ghajini? Well I did recently, and boy does he look good! Anybody knows if he is an Iyer-brahmin just in case.....?
thoughts on a manic Monday
I have quite a picturesque view from the window in my office.Right down below my window is the parking lot beyond which is a hustling eating joint, Daisy and Duke's set across the background of a landmark of ASU, the A mountain. The 'A' on the mountain is usually yellow, gold to be technically right which is one of the colors of ASU, maroon and gold except during the first week of classes when its painted white to mark the beginning of the semester.That day, however ,someone had decided to grace the 'A' with maroon spots and sure, it did brighten up the A. It was a prank by someone who probably did it for the kick of doing something taboo.But what I really didnt understand was who would actually bother to do something like that just for the heck of it?
It reminded me of 'Hack', a group of students in MIT whose identity is sworn to secrecy and whose primary goal was to play pranks with baffling ingenuity.Some of the noted 'achievements' of the group that dates back to the early 1930s were
- Hanging down a truck and a dummy cow from a dome that had no straight entrance of any sort...its one thing to imagine how they even got up there let alone manage to dangle a truck from there!
-Hiding the President's office completely with posters and announcements
-Turning every chair in a class( which was in an auditorium) away from the professor
-Handing out instructions on how to make paper planes among freshmen and passing it off as assignments.It had them make it and instructed them to aim it at their professor at 11:15 am sharp .And surely enough, the next day the professor was bombarded with planes from all directions and he had no clue why!
-Changing traffic signs "walk " and "dont walk" to "chew"(whoa...???)
-Changing ancient inscriptions on the domes of the buildings to garbage.
Sounds like nerds can be fun huh?
a colorful digression
Landing in Philadelphia was biting through a giant sandwich of fog.It was bright and sunny up high in the sky and down below was a thick blanket of clouds and as we hit the vapour, kept encountering layers and layers of it.At that moment , I simply wished I had this giant broom with which I could sweep all the clouds away and let the sun shine through.I just couldn't help thinking of the sun far beyond the clouds after I landed- I knew it was out there when it was lashing and pouring rain on the streets of boston when I was out there to have a good time..and I did nevertheless.
I was always under the impression that Boston, New Jersey, New York and the sort, ie most of the East Coast in general carried a certain coldness and callousness as a remisnisence of their English past.So I kinda assumed no-one would actually notice that I was the only girl in sight who was in a skirt and a pink one at that!The stares I got were definitely noticable, one to the extent that a girl refused to take her eyes off me inspite of my trying my time-tested technique of staring back..it was supposed to make her uncomfortable!Throughout my trip, I had continued to dress in vibrant colors so reminscent of the Arizona sun and its colors and not to mention, continued to get those looks from people so much so that I got so used to them that they were banal.On a flowing long yellow skirt I wore, my cousin commented that the papers the next day morning would carry news about a UFO (Unidentified Floating Object) - so much for being a contrast.....
Glad to be back in Arizona where summer colors are still welcome .....and thank God for that!
A chaotic morning....
It was one of those days ( not so much of a rarity in my case) wherein things just didnt go the way I planned. I had to catch a flight to Philadelphia at 9:14 am and calculated that the best time to be at the airport would be 8:30 since I already printed out my boarding pass via Web check-in.But what an overly indulging experience of "coffee meditation" ( the art of savoring the aroma, taste and cherishing coffee as part of a meditation routine) could do to me is this-I overran my time estimate and had to wake up my roomie,who thankfully, is a friend to pack my lunch and rushed to the bus-stand which was amazingly closer than my estimate( again-utterly bad planning in action) and caught the earlier bus than the one I intended which was running late!( Now that had nothing to do with my plans)
The sight which met my eyes at the airport made the web-checkin one of the most intelligent decisions I had taken in my recent memory-God Bless America-West! The airport was teeming with chaotic confusion with never ending lines of passengers waiting for their boarding passes.My early arrival to the airport had not affected my schedule in anyway as I inched along the long lines through the security point which was clearing at a furious pace and surprisingly enough, there were no tags with security stamps on the baggages of the passengers.Perplexed, I reached my gate to board my plane and was more surprised to see people already boarding in full swing.
Once inside the aircraft, an announcement by the hostess made this confusion comprehendable.Due to bad weather conditions in Philadelphia, our aircraft will have to wait for 4 hours in Phoenix if it doesnt take off in the next 10 minutes! What ensued after the announcement was part excitement and partly hilarious.I joined the passengers next to my seat and the nearby aisles in vehemently pleading "Please sit down" to every passenger who boarded in the last few minutes left to avoid the imminent fate of having to wait for 4 hours as I just had a few hours in Philadelphia before I had to catch a train to Boston.Towards the last minute, the steward made a call for a certain Marcus to show himself up and since there was no immediate response from anybody, a guy behind me went " Everybody show their hands up, we gotta get this plane moving".I burst out into a nervous laughter.Thankfully, the plane took off soon after despite the prediction of the lady next to me that we were not going to make it.
An early landing in Philadelphia was nevertheless in vain as the weather had progressively degressed and it was pouring rain.Although I couldn't see much of Philadelphia more so because of the weather my period of stay, I enjoyed the change from a never-say-die summer heat of Arizona.Its the magic of the East Coast I guess!So much so that I didnt even wear a sweatshirt until late in the evening just to feel what it was to be cold!
The girl who went up the hill and came down the sky
Last weekend was pretty amazing.I had attended a percussion concert by the ensemble "Heartbeat" headed by Karthick, a talented disciple of the famous ghatam artiste Vikku Vinayakaram.But the highlight of the weekend was my long(read an year long!)-awaited trip to the
A mountain, one of the landmarks at
ASU.All that I needed to get to the top was 20 minutes but I never did so in a whole year because of lack of company.The only time I had tried to get onto the top was when I real real upset and wanted to get "high" but didnt do so as I was getting lost in the trail and didnt like the idea of rattlesnakes and scorpions( which is quite likely in Arizona) lurking among those lonely trails at sunset.
I finally found company last weekend and boy, did I have fun! Its amazing how easily one could turn the "big bad world" to a teeny weeny colony with specks of light scattered all across the floor much like the plethora of stars and galaxies that shine above us.It felt like we were between two blankets of stars leaving me undecided as to which one was more breathtaking...I had none left.As I gaped at the wonders of creation in awe, my friend showed me all the other mountains he has "conquered" and famous haunts in Arizona including a strip club I had never heard of.At the moment, everything else had turned magically insignificant and dreams of trip to a faraway land with enchanting beauty began weaving inside my head.Although the trip didnt work out due to mundane worldly issues which I do not wish to recollect at the moment which are the "lows" that are not worthy of my contempation, it still is amazing how imagination can transform the seemingly banal to a whirlwind of excitement...
Tiffin Dibba
I read a word yesterday I had forgotten for sometime now since I came to the US- tiffin dibba. It was on a sign outside my door and read "Tiffin dibba" totally awesome desi food delivered hot and fresh to your office in the university! Couldnt help laughing.....
