HOW TO IDENTIFY CITIES

IDENTIFYING INDIAN, PAKISTANI, BANGLADESHI, NEPALI AND SRI LANKAN CITIES (AND NORTH AMERICA) 

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Scenario 1

Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along, sees them and walks on.

That's MUMBAI

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Scenario 2

Two guys are fighting. Both of them take time out and call their friends on their mobiles.

Now 50 guys are fighting.
You are definitely in PUNJAB !!!

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Scenario 3

Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along and tries to make peace. The first two get together and beat him up.

That's DELHI

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Scenario 4

Two guys are fighting.
A crowd gathers to watch. A guy comes along and quietly opens a Chai-stall (like lemonade stand)

That's AHMEDABAD

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Scenario 5

Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes.
He writes a software program to stop the fight. But the fight doesn't stop because of a virus in the program.

That's BANGALORE

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Scenario 6

Two guys are fighting. A crowd gathers to watch.
A guy comes along and quietly says that "AMMA" doesn't like all this nonsense. Peace settles in...

That's CHENNAI

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Scenario 7

Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along, then a fourth and they start arguing about who's right.

You are in KOLKATA

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Scenario 8

Two guys are fighting. Third guy comes from nearby house and says, "don't fight in front of my place, go zumwhere yelse and kyeep fighting".  

That's KERALA !
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It two guys are courteous to each other and each one wants the other to step into the train first as respect and in that first you, first you, pahlay aap, pahlay aap, the train takes off

You are in Lucknow !!!

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and the best one is ....

Scenario 9
Two guys are fighting. Third guy comes along with a carton of beer. All sit together drinking beer and abusing each other and all go home as friends.

You are in GOA !!!

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MEANWHILE, HALFWAY ROUND THE GLOBE...

Scenario 10

Two guys are trying to get worked up enough to fight.

A third comes along and suggests that, please, can they they all go get something to drink.

They all jog to Starbucks after agreeing to drink only Fair Trade Coffee.

Most definitely that is SEATTLE, my current city.

(A few years back, Seattle was given the title of the USA's most polite city.)

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Scenario 11

Two guys are fighting.  One gives the other a bloody nose.

The first apologises and offers to drive him to the emergency room.

Then they both drink a Molson's with a third guy who just happens along.

You are anywhere in CANADA (except Quebec).

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Scenario 12

Two guys are fighting.  They take a cigarette break while cursing at each other.

A third guy walks by and says, "Good morning."

They beat him up because he spoke English.

Now that's MONTREAL (where I was born.)

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My Tribute to the People of Japan

My Tribute to the People of Japan, originally uploaded by Mai1984.

This is my recognition of the spirit, courage and civility of the Japanese people and their response to the recent trisaster.

This is a reminder that the Sun is always shining. Sometimes we just can't see her.

Below is the the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami, while Fujiyama soars above the tragedy. Above all, the benevolent presence of Amaterasu-no-Kami, the Sun Goddess and chief deity of the Shinto religion, gives her blessing and strength to her people, the people of Japan.

(Note: I am neither Shinto nor Japanese. If I have hurt anybody's religious sensibilities, please let me know and I will correct the matter.)

With much thanks to Derek Visser. Three of his photos were used to make the Fukushima plant here:
www.flickr.com/photos/vizpix/5530864283/
www.flickr.com/photos/vizpix/5529845859/
www.flickr.com/photos/vizpix/5529038135/

To the United States Air Force
www.flickr.com/photos/usairforce/5529732202/
and
the US Pacific Fleet(Navy)
www.flickr.com/photos/compacflt/5529922582/

I believe all other images used are in the Public Domain.

A Conversation Between Twins

Going out of the Womb

"In the belly of a pregnant woman, two babies have a conversation. One of them is a believer and the other is an atheist. (*)


The atheist: Do you believe in life after birth?


The believer: Sure. Everyone knows that there is life after birth. We are here to grow and be strong enough and prepared for what awaits us after.


The atheist: Nonsense! There cannot be any life after birth! Can you imagine how this life would be?


The believer: I do not know all the details, but I think there is more light, and maybe we'll walk around and we’ll eat there.


The atheist: Nonsense! It is impossible to walk and eat! Ridiculous! We have the umbilical cord that feeds us. I just want to point out to you that life after birth cannot exist because our life, the cord, is too short.


The believer: I'm sure it's possible. It will just be a bit different. I can imagine how it will be.


The atheist: But nobody ever came back from there! Life simply ends due to birth. And frankly, life is a great suffering in the darkness.


The believer: No, no! I do not know exactly how our life will be after birth, but in any case, we will meet our mother and she will take care of us!


The atheist: A mother? Do you really think we have a mother? So where is she then? "

Courtesy Marina Griva & Otilia Torres Brizuela, by way of Harry Rakhraj on Facebook. 

BREATHING WATER

A Slideshow of my FishWorld Tanks.  Not as elaborate as some; still they're mine!

And I have never been either to Australia or to Fiji, but they insisted on a location.

Breathing Water Slideshow: Mai’s trip from Seattle, Washington, United States to 2 cities Fiji (near Matangi Island, Fiji) and Aquarium Passage (near Ascot, Western Australia, Australia) was created by TripAdvisor. See another Australia slideshow. Take your travel photos and make a slideshow for free.

Squirrel Appreciation Day

I did not make this up. Don't get me wrong, I like squirrels. I am not one of those Nazi-types that considers them rats with pretty tails. Where we used to live they actually came into our apartment, climbed up my lrgs and ate peanuts from my hand. Fortunately, none ever bit me because then I would have had to get rabies shots. Anyway, here's the article.

I suggest you NOT celebrate by eating Brunswick stew,  although I suppose that is a somewhat perverted way of appreciating these delightful rodents. 

Go Nuts for Squirrel Appreciation Day

posted by: alicia graef

Squirrels are adventurous and bold, smart, adorable in their antics, adapt to wide ranges of fragmented habitat, drive bird feeders crazy with their raids, play a crucial role in balancing insect populations, spread seeds in forests and fields and now, with the changes of global climate, they are helping scientists understand how nature is adapting.
For all this and more, January 21 has been designated Squirrel Appreciation Day, an idea created by wildlife rehabilitator Christy Hargrove in Asheville, North Carolina.
Hargrove points out that you probably won't find any events to attend, but you can celebrate by putting food out, or learning something new about squirrels.
There are more than 300 species of squirrel. In the boreal forests of Canada’s Yukon Territory the red squirrel females are giving their secrets to scientists who are studying females endowing their offspring with genetic changes that may help their species adapt to global warming.
In 2003, a 10-year study found that female red squirrels were giving birth 18 days earlier than their great-grandmothers did, an average of six days earlier in each generation as temperatures in the region have risen about 4 degrees F during the past three decades. The increase has also lead to an abundance of pine cones that prefer drier climate.
Researchers monitored 664 females, including 325 followed throughout their lifetimes and found that natural selection is at work. Babies born earlier, some in the dead of winter as February ends in the Yukon, will be stronger and there will be less competition for territory adults left vacant the previous winter.
The discovery marked the first documentation of genetic changes in a mammal to climate change.
Red squirrels, about half the size of their plump gray squirrel relatives in the east, living in a vast empire from the northern tree line of Alaska and Canada south through the Rocky Mountains and into mountain peaks of Arizona and Midwest and Appalachian forests, squirrels have been given different names such as piney, barking squirrel, mountain boomer and chickaree for their scolding alarm.
When they’re not busy doing their job in nature, they seem to have a mischievous streak when it comes to human beings. Twice, in 1987 and in 1994, squirrels brought down the NASDAQ stock market, a nationwide network of telephones and computers where some 300 million shares are traded each day. In 1987 a playful squirrel in Trumbull, Conn, shut down the national Association of Securities dealers’ automatic quotation service for 82 minutes, keeping about 20 million shares from being traded. Seven years later, in 1994, a squirrel interrupted trading for 34 minutes by chewing through an electric company’s power line and the stock exchange’s backup power system in Trumbull.
Visit the National Wildlife Federation for a list of ways you can celebrate squirrels or become a citizen scientist by participating in Project Squirrel. You can also visit Squirrels.org for a handful of information from building squirrel friendly feeders and rescue to humane squirrel control.

Nightmare, With Angels

I made this picture to go with the poem.

Nightmare, With Angels


By Stephen Vincent Benét
An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professorial-historical-economic and
irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-
engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model T or even an early Napier,
They’d have built good enough roads for it (they
knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon
and Moscow,
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood
over the entire Western World!"
He changed his expression, looking now like
a combination of Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc and
a dozen other scientists, writers, and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to Cooperate, if there'd
never been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been
the Church of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the
peace of Christ (who loved peace) like a great,
beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
"Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their
carvings and their great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities
with a green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skilful, certainly they created.
And, in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the
smoking heart on the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully till Pizarro
smashed them
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very
agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet and gunpowder and they had
to get married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skulls, the handsome folk, the
excellent scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with the sensitive brain (they
drew the running reindeer) .
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos
and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of
Supposing Aurelius, Confucius, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama,
Alexander--
Just to take half a dozen--
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now,
perturbed spirit? "
He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another
angel approached me. -
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in
cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for
gas-masks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator nor
munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the pre-
fabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the
Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding
universe.

In fact, you will not be saved."
Then he showed his hand:
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small
metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke
and the armies sprang up.


Picture credits: I believe all pictures used in this are in the public domain except for the gas mask, which is one recommended for civilian use by the Israeli army

A GOAT MAKES A LION SHEEPISH

For the last few months, my creative endeavours have been mostly concerned with visual arts instead of writing. I’ve been working with Photoshop and gif and, most recently, with Windows Movie Maker. I have also been teaching myself to knit Estonian lace, an accomplishment for those with two usable hands. 

My writing has kind of fallen into the bin of things I just don’t make the time for. A couple of dear friends have really been pestering me to write something, anything. Today, there is a heavy rain and I feel like a change, so I will write about an incident on our lovely little farm many, many years ago when life was simple and generally a lot of fun.

I’m not sure I can write this. It’s about the funniest thing that ever happened to me and even thinking about it I can’t stop laughing. It concerns a grumpy, cantankerous nanny goat – they are all grumpy and cantankerous, but this one seemed to have some special chip on her goat shoulders – and a strong, dignified, self-possessed Khalsa lion who was always in control of himself and never let anything discombobulate him.

A lovely Saturday summer’s day on the farm. Mani had decided that I needed a break from my usual routine and that he would milk the goats. I admit I wasn’t too sure that that was a good idea. Mani was a great doctor and very good at doing almost everything, but he was a city boy right down to his cellular structure and the farm was an alien environment to him. I was, of course, raised in the city, but parts of our summers in India had been spent on the family farm, always a welcome relief from the filth of the city. I sort of caught the farming bug then and felt at home on our little farm.

 
Back to milking the goats. Mani, of course, looked perfect. He had decided to play nihang, I guess, and was wearing a blue chola and a perfectly tied turban. I knew the goats wouldn’t be impressed, but, to be honest, I was. He always – almost always – impressed me. So he took the milking bucket and all 6’ 3” (191 cm) of himself out to the barn.

 

I sat down in the kitchen to work on my knitting and enjoy a cup of tea and some homemade bread and jam.

For a time all was peaceful. I could hear the happy little birds chirping and the sound of Sandeep and Rosa’s kids playing happily in the back ground when—

Mani came running full speed into the kitchen, screaming as I had never heard him scream before, in a complete panic – (Sorry, I have to stop for a laugh time) – “Shut the door! Shut the door!”

[Freeze frame] Before I continue with the action, I must describe my thoroughly discombobulated husband. His chola had somehow come completely open, his turban was loose and disheveled and goat milk – my wonderful goat milk – my dribbling from his drenched beard. What milk had managed to make it into the bucket was slopping and spilling all over the floor.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t shut the door. All I could do was laugh helplessly. Normally I am a kind person who wouldn’t just laugh at someone in such panicked distress, but this was my imperturbable Mani, the always calm, always perfect Mani Singh with goat milk dribbling down his beard onto his naked hairy chest.

[Resume action] Immediately behind him ran one very determined nanny goat. Determined to catch him and do God-only-knows-what to him. Needless to say, I could not close the door. I was laughing too hard. I think ROFL had not yet been invented, but I was laughing so hard that I was bent over double, unable even to breathe, and actually fell out of the chair onto the floor. ROFL. So there I was, helplessly laughing on the floor – which by now was slippery with goat milk, my husband first glaring down at me and then at the goat and one nanny goat standing, smiling triumphantly at the whole scene.









“If you can stop laughing long enough, get that damned beast out of our kitchen!” Poor Mani just didn’t see the humour of the situation yet. (He would later, of course.) I struggled to my feet and slid over to the goat while Mani made his way to one of the chairs. He was almost there to safety when he slipped and that whole big body crashed to the floor. He grabbed at the table and managed just to catch the end of the tablecloth, pulling jam and bread and tea onto his prostrate body. I am sure that someday, in some remote corner of hell, I will pay for this, but I couldn’t resist saying, “Lo, how the mighty are fallen,” as I picked myself up. The goat meanwhile had started nibbling at a flower pot on the counter and had pooped on the floor. I managed to get her out of the kitchen and back to the barn. She liked me well enough and I suppose that she was content to return home, having had her triumph. 

Still barely in control of myself, I quickly ran back to our house, to the kitchen, hoping to get to a camera before Mani regained his senses. I was too late. He had already run off to the shower. Not before disposing of the goat poop, though.

I started to clean up the mess, leaving him to nurse his wounded pride. After a time, he returned, looking again like Mani, calm, self-possessed and all that, although he was very, very red from blushing embarrassment. Rather sheepishly, he insisted on finishing cleaning up the kitchen, which was very sweet of him. I made another pot of tea and ate my jam and bread and knitted and burst out laughing every time I even glanced at him.

Two things I learned from this:

1. Bana is not appropriate attire for milking goats.
   
2. Goats do not belong in my kitchen.

Mani never offered to milk the goats again. 





 

Picture credits can be found at:    Goats Don't Belong In the Kitchen