Musings From New York

My iPod tells me summer's coming ...

I was fooling around with my Mac's iCal program, and I was trying to add US holidays. Apple's website has a great library, including a great a calendar subscription about movie releases. Unfortunately, it only goes out 30 days (or maybe its 2 months, I won't be sure till next week ... Kartik, any ideas?)

Anyway, I thought I'd list some of the movie releases I hope to be seeing over this summer. I say "hopefully" because, quite frankly, the Lady has some serious hangups about my choice of movies.

• Spiderman 3, May 4th: Ah, the Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman. Catches thieves just like flies, apparently.
• Shrek the Third, May 18th: The second movie was a bit of a disappointment compared to the sheer exhilarating originality of the first. The trailer to the last installment doesn't offer me much hope, but the glass is always half-full, I always say!
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, May 25th: Following the disappointment that was Dead Man's Chest, I'm hoping that this movie will offer fans "more Gore, and less Verbinski" (to quote the Ninja)
• Ocean's Thirteen, June 8th: Does anyone detect a trend of excellent first movies, mediocre second movies, with the third & final installment this summer?
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, June 15th: To be fair, I thought the first FF movie was pretty crap. But what the heck, this is the only movie to open this weekend that I considered putting on this list.
• Evan Almighty, June 22nd: Two words. Steve Carrell rules. OK, that's three words.
• Ratatouille, June 29th: Can Pixar boounce back from the ignomy of losing an Academy Award? Their movies are innovative in plot and setting, to say the least.
• Live Free and Die Hard, June 29th: Refer above, regarding strong first movies in a franchise. The thing that really irks me about the Die Hard series is that the producers seem to have forgotten what makes a good Die Hard film. One man + A closed environment = Die Hard. Not running around New York City, or Chicago. That's any run of the mill action flick.
• Transformers, July 6th: I played a lot with these toys as a kid, though I can never remember which action figures I had, or what they turned into. Hopefully, this movie will not be part of the "Wreck your childhood dreams" camp (ref: any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, July 13th: Admittedly, I thought Book 5 was pretty darned crap. Yeah, he's going through puberty. Yeah, he has emotional turbulence wrought by hormonal imbalances & stuff. Someone smack this kid along the ears and tell him to stop sniveling, please?! The last few movies have been pretty good though. Hopefully, the writers for this movie installment can edit out the emotional crap we had to endure over 500 pages.
• The Simpsons Movie, July 27th: I love anything Matt Groening has done. Long live Futurama! Oh wait ... this is The Simpsons. Ah well, still good stuff. The writing of the show kinda flopped around a bit over the last few years, but this last season has been very strong in political and social satire. Hopefully, the movie producers kept the same writers around.
• The Bourne Ultimatum, August 3rd: Hmm ... yet another trilogy with a weak middle part. But Matt Damon really owns this character, and I do look forward to this movie.
• Rush Hour 3, August 10th: Verbal constipation meets verbal diarrhea for the third time. But I'm a fan of Jackie Chan and his crazy ass stunts.
• Mr. Bean's Holiday, August 31st: A big hit across the pond, this movie spawned an essay examinging why Bean was the cultural ambassador to the rest of the world.

Toto, I've got a feeling ...

My next project's in Kansas. Yep. Tornado City. I want some red shoes so that before I fly back every week I can tap them three times and say "There's no place like home".

On the other hand, I wonder if I get the chance to drive around searching for Smallville.

Weekend Update

A relaxed weekend for the most part.

The Lady & I attended a wine & cheese tasting class on Friday night, at the Artisinal Cheese center on 36th & 8th. 4 wines (2 white, 2 red), and 8 cheeses (at least half of which were European goat and sheep cheeses). The 4 glasses of wine combined were about 2/3rds of a bottle, and I will admit ... I had a bit more wine than was strictly necessary to the exercise (but just a bit more). The technique is apparently to:

1. Taste the wine by itself ... which we duly did, taking notes about bouquets, essences, textures, and finishes (note to self: also try grandiose and meaningless descriptions such as "hint of toast")
2. Taste the cheese by itself ... if required, hold nose while doing so ... I mean there were some pretty whiffy cheeses there. We're not talking your Krafts singles here.
3. Combine wine & cheese ... and pay attention to texture, finish, the combined taste and so on.

We had to grade the combinations to figure out what worked best, and now that we've learnt these arcane & mysterious techniques, the Lady & I will do our best to broaden the horizons.

Speaking of broadening horizons, I picked up some interesting booze on the way over from London the last time. I forget their names, and they're over at the Lady's apartment in Boston (I'd flown back to Boston to attend a conference last week). One of them is a Brazilian white rum, made from molasses I believe ... its the smoothest rum I have ever had. The other, which I am dying to try when Dad gets here is Hendrick's gin which I believe should be taken with a slice of cucumber, rather than lemon.

Anyway, back to the weekend ...

Saturday turned out to be a record breaker hot one. The Lady & I walk in the park, along with what appeared to be half of New York City. We seem to mainly stick to the East side of the Park, as that's where we enter and leave ... one of these days, I must check out the West side. Anyway, the park was jumpin' & jivin', and we were lucky enough to find ourselves seated next to a band called Break of Reality, just as they were setting up. The group is 3 cellists (roughly broken out into "bass", "rhythm" and "lead" players) and a drummer (who played a bongo drum type of thing). The effect is not unlike Apocalyptica's music - slow, heavy ... almost ... well, almost METAL. Needless to say, I bought the CD they had on sale. Its good stuff! ... We also got to listening to a jazz quartet (I think ... might have been a trio), and I came to the realization that I enjoy listening to live jazz, but I just get bored listening it on a CD. There's something about seeing the virtuoso that allows me to enjoy what I would otherwise consider muzak. Weird ...

Hah.

The best 300 spoof so far ...

Farenheit 1997*

Wil Wheaton (or as he will always be to geeks like me, Ensign Wesley Crusher) had a piece up today about tabletop games, and invited his readers to submit their favorite "analog" or "tabletop" games. I put down a comment about Rummy, Bluff, and Uno. Gotta admit, in a raucous and boisterously fun group, Bluff is a heck of a lot of fun for a card game.

Anyway, thinking about card games made me think back to my senti sem (last semester on campus, so named as one gets sentimental about times spent in BITS), when my wing had a nightly ritual of playing a game we'd dubbed "Temperature". Don't me why. Just roll with it. I thought I'd share the rules of the game with my readers so the more jobless & group-oriented might have a try at it.

1. All cards have face value. Picture cards (i.e: J/ Q/ K) are 10 points each. Aces are 1 point each. Jokers are 0 points. The winner of a hand is the first person to successfully declare the lowest hand (i.e.: the hand whose card values is the lowest)

2. Depending on the number of players, multiple decks of card need to be used, including the Jokers. A judgment call has to be made about how many cards are dealt to each player. So from experience: 5 players need 1 deck, have 5 cards dealt to each player, with the remaining (29) cards in the middle; 6-7 players will need 2 decks, have 7 cards dealt to each player, with remaining cards in the middle.

3. With the remaining deck in the middle: open the top card and slide it under the deck. All other cards of that value are the additional Jokers, with 0 points value. Open the next top card and lie it face up next to the deck. This is the active card.

4. The person to the left of the dealer starts the game.

5. As stated above, the object of the game is to lower the total value of cards in hand. This can be done in several ways:

• Pick up the top card of the deck in the middle, and discard one card from the hand (in that order). The discarded card can be the one you've just picked up.
• Pick up the active card (top card lying face open in the middle), and discard one card from your hand (in that order). However, the discarded card cannot be the one you just picked up.
• If picking up the active or top card created pairs, triplets, etc. of a type, then all cards of that type, regardless of suit, can be discarded together on the next turn. So for example, if I have a Queen of Diamonds, and the active card is Queen of Hearts, I can pick up the Q-of-H, and drop the Q-of-H and the Q-of-D.

6. If the middle deck is exhausted, pick up the pile of open cards, turn them over, shuffle them, and reuse them as the new middle deck.

7. When a player thinks he has the lowest total, he shows his hand and declares the total. If he does have the lowest total (which can be non-zero BTW), then the player receives 0 points, and all others receive points equal to the value of their hands. If the player has incorrectly declared, he receives a 50 point penalty, the real "winner" receives 0 points, and all other players receive points equal to the value of their hands.

8. As players cross a pre-designated threshold, for example 300 points, they are eliminated from the game. The last man standing is the winner.

Tips & Tricks:

• Take risks early on by forming pairs and triplets to drop on the next turn. This means I've dropped my hand value by a large number, but more importantly, I've decreased the number of cards. This is quite an important strategy that pays off in middle and end-game: if I have 5 cards in hand, my maximum value is 50 points, but if I've lost one card, I can only have 40 points. Towards the end, when most players have just one or two cards, it becomes quite a guessing game if a one-card hand can beat a two-card hand.
• Beware picking up high value cards to form pairs or triplets in the end-game. Other players can see how many cards you have and its no great feat to deduce the value of your hand based on the card you've picked up. This may lead another player to declare before you've had a chance to discard your cards.
• Remember - its not just picture Jokers that have a value of 0. An additional Joker was drawn at the beginning of the game. If you're lucky, its a picture card (J/ Q/ K) that went from 10 point to 0 ... if you're unlucky, the additional Joker is an Ace, which was only 1 point to begin with.

It sounds a bit long-winded I know, but once you get the hang of it, speed up the game play, and let the good times roll!

* It's the temperature at which your brain explodes.

Where In The World (Is Axe)?

I've been in London for the past couple of weeks, flying back last Friday. This last trip was good fun - got to spend a good amount of time with Kartik & Dad, eat at several great restaurants, and saw two excellent movies - "Hot Fuzz" and "300".

Will write more when I get a chance.

Songs That Rocked (My World) Pt. I

The idea for this post came from a recent "random" listen-to of my music collection. This "random" playlist threw up several songs in sequential order that for some reason had me skulking down Memory Lane and the realization that my dominant preference for music (hard rock, preferably from the 80's) is grounded in these songs. Hell, some of my memorable teenage behaviors were founded on these two songs.

First, a word on that most awesomest of hard rock bands, Guns 'N' (F-ing) Roses. Growing up in India in the early 90's, I didn't have ready access to hard rock ... especially since my only other cousin that had any sort of interest in Western music was 10 years older than me, and preferred 80's pop-rock, such as the lighter tracks by Europe ... and his sister was a big Wham fan. So my source for all things hard & heavy was MTV.

Now I don't know what MTV was like in the US in the 90's. The fact that it had Headbanger's Ball says a lot, in my book. In India, MTV was cool. I mean, seriously cool. They opened the fledgling Indian market to a whole aspect of TV ... music videos! Hot VJs! Cool, funny, anarchic bits in between ads! And so my first exposure to GNR was through their chartbusters - "Sweet Child of Mine", "November Rain" and " Don't Cry".

Based on that limited viewing, I thought GNR was this ultra-cool, ballad singing, axe-wielding group ... until I got hold of a copy of "Appetite for Destruction". Admittedly, I thought the cover was a bit odd for a crooner band, but I popped it in on Side A, rewound the tape, hit play ... and had every nerve in my body react in gleeful, primal fury to ... "Welcome To The Jungle". I can honestly say that while on the outside I appeared slightly slack-jawed and staring off into empty space (not too different from my regular appearance, I suppose), inside I was rioting in the streets, swinging at phantom enemies in frustrated fury, the screams of voice and guitar mirroring my own rages.

Dear Gods, I just broke out in a cold sweat recalling that moment.

I went on to become a huge Guns 'N' Roses fan. I even loved "The Spaghetti Incident?" ... I had posters on my walls in BITS, and went into severe mourning when they broke up in 1994. I've tried to listen to Slash's Snake Pit, and Velvet Revolver, in the hopes that I could recreate that sense of loyalty, but it's true what they say - the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.