echoed

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

- W.B Yeats, The Second Coming

goblins in my bookshelf

Blossom is an awesome bookstore. They have three floors just _packed_ with stuff. Reams of it.
I bought one called ' The Wizards of Odd' - promises to be a good read. It's a collection of humorous fantasy short stories. Still, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We'll see.
Short story collections are good for checking out authors too. So now, I will find out what Terry Pratchet writes like . I'd been putting off Terry Pratchet just to annoy a friend and a cousin who've both been bugging/begging me to pick up a book and get with it.

The first Dirk Gently is next on the cards - saw it today but picked the Wizards up instead. Douglas Adams hit it when he put a hard-boiled detective and the gods and Valhalla and the I Ching in one grab bag of weirdness that's Dirk Gently.

Detectives we little boys like. Ditto for guns,ships,planes, any and all complicated machines for that matter, long overcoats ... and also magic & magicians, super-powers, swords , spears,adventure, knights and horses. Not to keen on ponies though.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is then the coolest movie ever made. It's got all the ingredients of play.

Blossom and Premier are such wonderful bookstores compared to the commercial ones. In these, the people working there typically know what book is where, unlike the larger commercial stores where clerks fiddle with computer consoles doing searches which usually turn up negative for slightly older books, or books my not-too-famous authors, or books not on the top-100-lists.

Stories and books were my friends way before kids. Before the usual Tinkle/Phantom/Bahadur/Disney comics, I can remember my dad telling me the William Tell story while feeding me warm-salted-curd-rice.
Story-telling's not easy, children are horrible taskmasters - stories narrated in one particular style have to be narrated the same way till the end of time. Change one line and you're labelled as someone who "doesn't know the story". And of course, the big-person-little-person thing.... for example, in the actual Pancha-Tantra, it was not the monkey's tail that gets caught between the split ends of the log when it sits on the it and pulls out the wedge.....

Good books come unannounced and cheap, change your life quietly and leave.
I pounced on 'The Money Culture' at the local scrap-dealer's coz the orange Penguin spine leapt into my vision as I was passing. Turned out to be a good buy. A great buy, in fact. Liar's Poker, bought at cost later, did it's bit to bring me out to where I am right now. Cryptonomicon turned up next at the same scap-dealer.
The effect of both these books can be described as nothing short of 'breathing life' into me at an excruciatingly draining (and boring) time . I got both the books for ten rupees each - a miracle that has never happened afterwards.
The Wizard of Earthsea wandered into my room when in undergrad hostel. While it almost definitely put me to sleep every time I curled up with it, I still remain an ardent lover of the ways of the mages and wizards, the archipelagoes and the simple fishing villages, dragons, gold and all. Lord of the Rings similiarly crept into my arms via a tattered red-cloth bound book of textbook size in the college library. Who'd have thought ....

After a long stint of buying books I _should_ read , like Penrose and Paul Ekman, and the mind-numbing that follows, I've turned to buying books I _will_ read. Sweetness will follow.

I'll go dig into the wizards now. You go and play for a while.
Or watch the 30-second-Bunnies version of popular films here

happy happy !!

dog hugs baby adorable photo sequence

original link on http://reddit.com

the profound blob said

the moment it is, it isn't any more

it just dawned

on me - without the yahoo emoticons, I'm conversationally crippled. Challenged, even
:-L

taken

all the good ones be

heart of a city

A busy week. People people and more people. Sacred ties, divine feasts, discovery of the horse-faced one, a fight between time and camera batteries. Farewells, politics, groaners and the plain kooky days. Enough of them already. Hearing my own tongue spoken fails to soothe any more.
Everybody's busy and I'm like a stone in the middle of a rushing stream. I wander through empty halls and trespass on living spaces. Sleep, coffee, errands , shuffling between houses and the eternal laundry questions, and before you know it, it's the end of the show. Now,where DID my week go !!!!
A drive, dinner, a walk .The vegetable & fruit mart, the corner shop, and there!! near the grocery store - a familiar silhouette !! But it's not you.
If you were here, I'd wait for you to get off work, we'd indulge you with a milk shake , or me with a coffee, walk though semi-lit streets with their half-hearted traffic, remark on this and that, your words would be cherished, but mine would be filed away for later reference ( I know your ways ), I'd sometimes hold your hand , we'd talk worries through,I'd be teased, blackmailed... we would drop you off at your place and I'd amble down to mine
and it would seem that the silver caresses of the full moon and the fragrance of the honeysuckle heavy in the air have replaced the intruding lights and smoke of the city's swarming traffic, and I'd float with eyes closed in a happy daze that would end when you get off work the next day. The roads and time would be ours.
They say a city doesn't claim you for its own until you claim one of its
I'm free to roam

wandering upon dusty abandoned bookshelves, I chanced on a page from the past - Enid Blyton's "Tales of Adventure" - a book from then when there was no confusion, book heroes were personal friends, and books needed illustrations like fish need water. As we grow up, the color vanishes from the books, from lives, gets replaced by a dull grey that we've grown to abhor yet tolerate. Not inevitably. I'm going to 'borrow' this book . Let's splash some of that paint again

some researched stuff on Camelot here

" Here lies Arthur, Once King and King to be "

first things first

not world peace. When I take over the world, the man who had the brilliant idea of putting peanuts in candy bars will be shot. And the lifeguard at the gene pool will be replaced.

in case I forget

Su-saaaannah!!
you're breaking my heart
you're shaking my confidence
Baybeeeeee !!!!

still

you took the rain with you
and a part of me
but I still can't make myself
say "adieu!!"

transit

home is a good transit point. the tribe's another. nothing comes close to going back to where you left off your life - start again with your uncle's Beatles tapes ... play with a toy bow and arrow ....