From Wired News, the hazards of working in the myriad ‘call centers’ in India:

[…] Partho let his accent slip and had to confess after being pointedly questioned that he was, in fact, an Indian sitting next to a telephone in Mumbai. "The man told me, 'You guys blew up the WTC,'" he said. "I tried to explain India had nothing to do with it, but he just banged the phone down."

Mandakini Pradhan, 21, once dialed an American home in an attempt to sell a caller ID system. The man told her, "Aren't you the girl who lives next door? Can you see me? I am naked."

‘Founded in 1959, Communication Arts is the leading trade journal for visual communications. It's the largest design magazine in the world and showcases the top work in graphic design, advertising, illustration, photography and interactive design.’slrs

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill Houseslq

Like logos?

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From the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest movie posters of the 20th century.


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In their September issue, the folks at Web User, the UK’s largest selling internet magazine, have selected their ten favourite weblogs. Here are their top three:

1. Beatnikpad
2. Rebecca Blood
3. Blogjam

Others on the list include Pop Culture Junk Mail and Swish Cottage.sll slrs

Found from a fellow blogger, who has a real classy looking blog at clagnut.com, a story in The Independent about a real Beckettian farce taking place in the London High Court. An excerpt:

Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler – for let us assume that that is your name – you are accused of purloining in excess of 40,000 hotel coat hangers.

Chrysler: I am.

Counsel: Can you explain how this came about?

Chrysler: Yes. I had 40,000 coats which I needed to hang up.

Counsel: Is that true?

Chrysler: No.

Counsel: Then why did you say it?

Chrysler: To attempt to throw you off balance.

Counsel: Off balance?

Chrysler: Certainly. As you know, all barristers seek to undermine the confidence of any hostile witness, or defendant. Therefore it must be equally open to the witness, or defendant, to try to shake the confidence of a hostile barrister.

Counsel: On the contrary, you are not here to indulge in cut and thrust with me. You are only here to answer my questions.

Chrysler: Was that a question?

Counsel: No.

Chrysler: Then I can’t answer it.

Part II of the story here.

The 50 best romantic reads, from the British newspaper The Independent, list freak that I am…sll

Last month The Guardian announced the results of its Best British Weblog competition. The winner was Scaryduck by Alistair Coleman of Weymouth, Dorset. Just checked out the blog. The chap has a good sense of humour:

In the name of God! Pretty Woman is not - repeat IS NOT a modern fairy tale about true love and the American Dream. It's a sordid little movie about a man who drives around picking up prostitutes. He's a kerbcrawler! A sex pervert! He probably even had a small rodent stuffed up his arse while he was at it...

And under a photograph of a suspicious-looking cat, he writes: ‘LESBIAN RABBITS TURNED MY CAT MENTAL’.

Coleman also maintains Scaryduck’s House of Lies – which has some pretty good howlers.

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Largecow is the website of British cartoonist and graphic novelist Hunt Emerson.



‘I was abducted by aliens once. They ate my trousers.’slrs

Nothing like a good annotated reading list to whet your appetite for books. Here’s one I found recently, from the September / October 1999 issue of the American Book Review. ‘The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English Language Books of Fiction’ is by Larry McCaffery, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University and is co-editor of the journal Fiction International. Save it to a floppy and read it at home.

More great book lists can be found at LiteraryCritic.com.sll slrs

Right, I’ll get to Marquez on some bright sunny day, after I can get myself to stop puzzling at the ambiguous undulations that pigeons make as they sink downward to darkness on extended wings…

Right now I am reading (rereading) collected stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Dear Clement, don’t waste your precious life reading the definitions of life, love and art, read any of these stories, especially the stories of 60's and 70's.

The grand mother shrugged her shoulder and took care of the musician. She handed him a bundle of bills that matched the figure written in her ledger.

"Two hundred and fifty numbers," she told him. "At fifty cents apiece, plus thirty two on Sundays and holidays at sixty cents apiece, that's one hundred fifty-six twenty.

The musician wouldn't accept the money.

"It’s one hundred eighty-two forty," he said. “Waltzes cost more.'

"Why is that?'

"Because they are sadder," said the musician.

The grand mother made him take the money.

"Well, this week you'll play us two happy numbers for each waltz I owe you for and we'll be even."

- ‘Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother'

Website of the Film and Television Institute of India here in Pune. Bad text, unattractive design, and the Admissions link does not work. Reminds you that the institute is run by the government. Seems like the private firm which designed the site learnt their trade from the Department of Audio-Visual Publicity (the notorious DAVP) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The latest goof of the DAVP I heard about is the ad they published on Gandhi Jayanti in a Gujarati newspaper which read, ‘An ungrateful[!] nation pays homage to the Mahatma on his birthday.’ The Congress promptly declared that if not on purpose, the slip was surely Freudian, and alleged that the Hindutvawadis in Delhi are still after the Mahatma more than half a century after they assassinated him.

kamera.co.uk chats with Asif Kapadia – director of the acclaimed British made Hindi-language film The Warrior. Says Kapadia:

My co writer Tim Miller… pitched me something he had read in a book of Japanese tales, it was a four line footnote: “A young Boy training to be a samurai, was bought before the Shogun, shown a severed head and asked if it was his father. The Boy knew it was not his father but to save his father's life he lied and said it was. To prove it, the Boy pulled out his dagger and killed himself. He would rather be dead than live with the shame his father had bought onto the family.” I thought it was such a powerful scene…

...in the introduction to which Slate's cartoonist Daryl Cagle argues that 9/11 brought out the worst in editorial cartoons.
[Click on above pic.]

Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index. HUGE collection of political cartoons.slrs

The NYT on American Desi.

Changed Salon’s archive template; got a drop-down menu for it. Changed archiving frequency to monthly. I dunno but all this seems to have solved the trouble with posting too. Everything fine then. Good.

For the archive template, used Phil Ringnalda’s Archive Script Generator, which I recommend. Because it uses JavaScript, which I have no idea of, I couldn’t get the archive pages to open in a new window.

The art of the graphic novel – an article from December 2000 in The Observer.

Top 10’s in the Guardian’s Books section: selections of favourite ten books in all sorts of genres and sub-sub-genres of publishing, by writers, editors, academics, et al. One life ain’t enough, man!

Sample: The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum’s ‘favourite books of the twentieth century’:

1. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
2. Ulysses by James Joyce
3. The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
5. Murphy by Samuel Beckett
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
8. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
9. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
10. Nostromo by Josef Conrad

It is also possible that you may discover something special: ‘The best comic strip of all time. The best illustrated book of all time. The best sustained work of surrealism of all time. A magisterial whodunwhat, full of little deaths and high adventure, insurrection and freedom.’ China Miéville here is talking about one book – Une Semaine de Bonte by Max Ernst.sll slrs