Today was a good day. A long wait seemingly came to an end ( going by history, though, I won't celebrate until the news gets more definite but yes, there is definite cause for cheer) - GRRM finally announced a publication date for ADWD, the 5th in the Iceand Fire series. YAAAAAAY! The 6-year wait has finally come to an end ( GRRM, you sly con, you ( Read more... )

What a trip! What a lot of birds!What wonders of creation birds are and how quickly are we destroying it? All 4 of these questiojns simultaneously swirled through my mind as I made my way back home from a 4-day birdwatching ( of the avian kind :) ) trip to Bharatpur. The trip was superbly organised by Jayanth Sharma of Toehold nature travels. He is ( Read more... )

Just wanted to note here that, for the first time in my life, I tasted a Trappist ale - a St.Bernardus triple. Quite strong and with a delicious flavour and smell of fruits, even S liked the ale - she can rarely even stand the smell of beer. Barring my overdone social discomfort episode, tonight's dinner at Sunny's was great fun ( though S's ( Read more... )

Phew! Finally, I'm back to blogging. I don't know if anyone else has felt this way but every time in the last few months that I decided to post about something, an enervating lethargy would creep over me [ Picture Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, soon after he takes the pill, as the metallic silver fluid engulfs him just before he is yanked out of the ( Read more... )

Read a news article ( link ) today about Jairam Ramesh on rediff. Finally, we have an environment minister who is not afraid to stand up to greedy, capitalist-minded business houses interested only in short-term gains. He is willing to put his neck on the line to deny environmental clearances for projects that endanger or destroy India's last ( Read more... )

 Just found out that Marvel might be considering re-booting some, if not all, the Cross-Gen franchises in the near future. Considering that Disney bought out Crossgen(in 2004 or 05) and recently acquired Marvel, too, this seems logical, but only in hindsight. I'm very excited and, as the author of this article announcing this news points out, some ( Read more... )

Just read an article in Environmental Graffiti about the Pistol Shrimp. Appearance-wise, this looks like any ordinary shrimp except for one of its claws: it is oversized and almost half the length of the shrimp itself. It is this claw that caused submarines in WW2 to suddenly discover extreme interference with their sonar, leading to an inability ( Read more... )

Check out the video at this link. Its a hilarious, steam-punk, semi-retro parody of the Transformers mythos and a telling lesson on why taking oneself too seriously is usually a path to the wastebin( as evidenced by the absolute faff that was Transformers 2, forget what its boxoffice take was). I loved this cute little video also for the steam-punk ( Read more... )

There - it is done now. Spain have won their first ever World Cup, deservedly, and the Dutch have finished as runners-up for the third time. It looks like, as is England's case in ODI cricket, they are fated to be perennial bridesmaids at the premier event. That said, however, it was the Spaniards who played with the flair of 70s Oranje while the ( Read more... )

Its been nearly 10 months since I started using Todoist, the online tasklist creator and activity planner. And until now, all that this has done is provide me with overwhelming evidence of my inability, or is it unwillingness, to schedule and run my life ( Read more... )