You had a bad day just sing a sad song....

Some days are just not yours. They squeeze you out like an orange and just suck out every ounce of energy from you. At the end of it, if you still keep your cool then you must start a monastery in the Himalayas or take sessions in Anger Management. You know what I mean. Yea, bad days. They can be so .. ummm.. bad! Just like the one Daniel Powter described in his song. Nice song but incredibly difficult to put into practice.

Research says that you have a bad day if you don't get adequate sleep. Either if you have woken up early or slept late (basically lack of sleep makes you nasty). In my case it started with both. I slept late AND woke up early. Not my doing but the weather just didn't like me being cuddled up in my bed for long. It all started with me going to bed with this unputdownable thriller. One of my vices is reading late into the night if I get a good book in my hands. I find this blissful as its quite quiet and it doesn't take much effort to concentrate with all the silence around. With the novel in my hand, I forget that there is this thing called time warp which does a number on your brain and you lose the sense of time. So by the time I looked at my watch the little hand had traveled twice around the dial after it had stuck 12. Time for me to sleep. I woke up after what I felt was only 5 minutes. It was 4:30 am. Time warp thing again. The rest is history I'd love to forget. The whole day was spent nursing a dull headache and listening (my ear plugs were nowhere to be found even after a frantic search) to an all day classical music lesson marathon which one of my unkindly neighbors had taken up for their pastime (I guess they are into research and experimentation on waging some kind of musical warfare on humans just like one of those chemical warfare things) just on the day when I decide to work from home. And then the daily Sudoku in the newspaper which I tried went awry. This was followed by interviews with a couple of guys who felt (or knew) that they knew more than I did. Downright rude! How I hate such kinda guys! They had picked up a wrong day to mess with me. I rejected them with the same amount of ruthlessness as Lex Luthor would use to kill Superman. Rather unkind of me but I am allowed to throw some meanness back at the big bad world that's been hurled at me by it. The only bright (or should I say a least painful) thing that happened was the spectacular crashing of the Stock Market (seems to be a record of sorts and people are calling it the Black Monday). Right after the day I had invested in some stock with my hard earned money! The stock is now at 75% of the price at which I bought. Sweet. I guess I should just kick my late night novel reading habit and wake up well after the Sun rises. Hope that brings some sanity back to my life. Let me try at least. Sweet dreams. Tomorrow's another day.

Non sequitur: I found this nice poster while browsing some site (courtesy: http://in.rediff.com/). Though I don't look like that guy even by a long shot the pic's a near accurate description of how I felt the whole day today. Shoot those darned demons lurking anywhere around.

...........
Cause you had a bad day
You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
...........
Excerpt from "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter

A Whiff of Class

Last night by sheer accident, while I was channel surfing on the TV, I came across a channel that was playing the movie "The Day of the Jackal". It felt nice watching an old classic. This is not the one that starred Bruce Willis, Sidney Poitier and Richard Gere. That one was horrible. This was the original that was shot in 1973. I had read the novel several times earlier on but never got a chance to see the movie. The book is one of my personal favorites and I always wondered how the movie would be like. Usually, as you all know, when you watch a movie thats based on a book, it won't be half as good. Case in point, "Da Vinci Code". I slept off by the time Tom Hanks got out of the Louvre with the pretty Ms. Tatou. Most of you who have read "Da Vinci Code" and also seen the movie will agree with me on this.

But surprise, surprise! I really liked "The Day of the Jackal". Though I wouldn't say that it was as great as the book, it certainly came close to it. The Director stuck to the details given in the book and never once took a diversion from the novel. The screenplay was excellent. What caught my eye was the editing. How one shot moved seamlessly into another so that sequence of events were being depicted from perspectives of both the protagonist as well as the assassin. Later when I checked the details of the movie in IMDB, I found out that the film had won the BAFTA award for Best Editing that year. Gave myself a pat on the back for my technical observation ;-) I won't go into the plot details as it is a thriller and if you want to see it, it would only ruin the fun. There was this whiff of class in each of the character. And the actors played the drama with understated panache. Uber cool. Those movies of the sixties and early seventies had their own charm and elegance. And before I forget, the cool Alfa Romeo the Jackal drives is nothing less than beautiful. I think the new Alfa 8C Competizione takes its design cues from this car. Pity they don't make cars like that anymore.

If you get a chance, do watch the film. That's my reco. A must watch, in my opinion.

Going Green - Nice link

A friend of mine sent a nice blog. If you are a Greenie like me then probably you will appreciate it:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Simple but effective way of telling things.

Fooled by a TV prank

It is certainly not funny when a prank you saw on TV happens to you or you assumed if it happened to you.

Sometime ago I had seen a TV prank which at that point I thought was outright funny. A guy is traveling in a car on a backroad in an Australian outback when he comes across a Traffic light right in the middle of nowhere and its on red. This is a straight road and there is no crossing. Added to this there is absolutely no traffic for miles. He waits patiently for a long time and when he loses his calm he tries to jump the signal. And the moment he crosses, a huge black patrol helicopter lands from nowhere and gives him a ticket. Before he can recover from the shock, a bunch of guys who were recording all this in a hidden camera come out and reveal that he's been tricked. They go on to explain that the traffic light, the helicopter, etc, were actually a set up. It felt quite funny too. Imagine a patrol chopper coming from nowhere to give you a ticket in the middle of nowhere because you could not wait forever for a red light to turn green in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of which, almost a similar thing had happened to me and I nearly ran into trouble. While driving down on a side road from the famed Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, me and my friend came across a Stop Signal that never turned green for a long time. We waited and waited but the light would stubbornly stay red. Mind you this was not even a cross road or a crossing. It is a narrow single road with a Stop light right in the middle of nowhere. You see what I mean? Similar scenario to what I had described earlier. Just ahead of the traffic light the road turns a sharp right and it is a blind spot because the road runs right next to a mountain.

As we patiently waited for what we thought was forever, there was another car that came and sat with equal patience behind us for the light to turn green. I had narrated the traffic light prank to my friend only a few days earlier. Finally, we were almost certain that either this was the same joke now being played on us or that this light was broken. Why else would you need a traffic light on a road without a crossing? Thus thinking (like a bunch of smart alecs) that we were smart enough to put the prank back on the pranksters we started to roll forward. That's when the car behind us started to honk at us like mad. Usually, a car behind you honks if you don't move or they feel that you are getting in their way, right? But there are some rare (very rare) drivers who honk to warn you. We got the feeling that this guy was the latter. Otherwise, why would someone honk at us as soon as we were trying to get out of his way? So we stopped and backed up to start waiting again. Soon we realized, what the light was all about. This road which I mentioned took a right and went right through the mountain as a single-laned tunnel. At any given time traffic from only one direction can pass through this road. So once every 5 minutes, traffic is stopped on one side to let the traffic from other side flow. In our case there was no through traffic coming from the opposite direction when the light was red for us and hence our suspicion of this being a prank had become stronger. Since the road turned right immediately it was difficult to guess what was on the other side. Probably a chopper waiting for you to make a mistake. Thanks to the driver behind us, we avoided getting into trouble. We later had a good laugh about it but it still haunts me to think what'd have happened if we hadn't heeded to the guy who had alerted us.

Looking back, it felt funny the kind of things can get you into trouble. A silly TV prank playing on your mind! Nice.