Pointless

I must recommend this:

www.haha.nu

Enjoy.

Projectiles

I just opened CNN and the following two articles greeted me:

1. NASA satellite crashes to earth minutes after launch

2. North Korea ready to launch satellite

There is something really disconcerting about that.

By the way, I just realised that the colour motif for the Economist, that paragon of democracy and free market capitalism is a bright Red ?!

Mahela on Facebook

I friend-ed Sri Lanka's captain, Mahela Jayawardena, on facebook a few days, just like that (actually, so that I look cool having such a famous cricketer on my friends list).

Man, that guy is one of those crazy facebook people. He's perpetually posting messages and status updates and videos and becoming a fan of this or the other. My news feed is now choked with the things Mahela does and the responses of others to his musings. He's been pimping some products he endorses and has posted a whole bunch of videos of the adverts. Amazingly, he has not let the ongoing test match (oh, and in which he scored 240, by the way) with Pakistan interfere with this at all. Score a double century, come back and post inanities - all in a day's work for Mahela.

He has someone called Rai Aishwarya on his friends list. I wondered - could it be? I mean, he's such a famous guy after all. Anyway, it turned out Rai Aishwarya has 12 friends, all Sri Lankan-sounding. So, it's possible it's not her, then.

Toys and Boys

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Evening colours

Adam Voges answers a question

There are so many great catches I've seen in cricket that it's difficult to pinpoint any one as the greatest...until yesterday. New Zealand, in their T20 with Australia, neded 20 off 12 balls - a six would have made it 14 of 11, with McCullum still batting. But what Voges did made it 20 off 11, with McCullum gone, and that proved decisive in Australia's 1 run win.

But even if this had been a completely inconsequential catch in a club match, I'd still rate it the greatest I've ever seen

Pictures

It's been so cold here - the coldest start to a winter in ten years, apparently - that you could walk on water. If, that is, you were a duck.

I've also been struck by how organised the Dutch are in their attempts to be thrifty. I cycled past a small lumber yard the other day, and it was full of pieces of dead wood that had either fallen off in the wind, or had been sawn off in order to prevent them from falling - were it to get windy - on someone's head. The lumberyard was split into two sections - one for softwood (that could be used to make paper), and another for hard woods. Waste not, want not is clearly the motto around here.

Got a bit of a refresher course in high school physics while taking pictures today. I like taking pictures of little puddles of water with the the sky (or a tree, or a cliff) reflected in them. There's an impish thrill in seeing the sky trapped in a few square inches of water. Or in seeing the bare branches of a tree twisted into strange and unnatural shapes - as if by a hurricane or hallucinogen - as the slightest breeze makes ripples on the surface of the water. 

My point is this: when you take such a picture, you can't focus on the surface of the water. You get a perfectly nice picture of the puddle and everything around it - like in picture above. The picture you are more likely to want, though, is - as every high school student knows - that of a virtual image somewhere "inside" the puddle, and you have to trick your camera into focusing on it. And then you get a picture like this.

How bad is this recession?

Guess who lost her job today? My former SMU career counsellor.

How we know that the situation in Pakistan is really bad...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/3_women_abduct_rape_man_in_Karachi/articleshow/4067214.cms

Yenge, Eugene and Holy,

Might come down to Singapore for a few days in the last week of February. Have to use up leave that I'd saved for the India trip in January. Want to patty lai dat or not?