In May of 2006, Bob was sent to Mumbai, India on a business trip. When he came back, he brought with him several cds recommended to him, one of which included this. Kajra re in English means ‘kohl-lined eyes’. I can’t say that I see a serious hot lesbian theme going on. In fact, as far as I can tell, in true Bollywood fashion, you could remove this song from the movie it was in (Bunty aur Bobli–a kind of comedy version of Bonnie and Clyde where the prinicpals are con artists) and nothing in the movie would be changed.

But it just kind of got in our brains. If there’s one thing they can do in Bollywood, it’s write hooks. We listened to it over and over. We stared singing it. Sort of. Our next door neighbors are from India and I can only imagine their amusement, or consternation, listening to us singing. I think we’re singing ‘your kohl-lined eyes, your black, black eyes…’ we could very well be doing the equivalent of those random word spam generators that say things like ‘doghouse excel worry worry’.

Fun facts about this video:

The woman dancing is Aishwarya Rai, “the most beautiful woman in the world” (Miss World 1994). She is not, however, actually singing.

The singer is Alisha Chinai, sometimes referred to as ‘the Indian Madonna’. Before that she was called Baby Doll.

Older Guy: Amitabh Bachchan
Younger Guy: Abhishek Bachchan, son of Amitabh
Both Amitabh and Abhishek are 6′3″.

Last but not least, the dancer (Rai) and the younger guy (Abhishek Bachchan) are engaged to be married.

This week is a bit crazy here. I have freelance work and my sister is visiting. You guys are all posting interesting stuff!

My younger child likes to shop. Now, I buy stuff–I am the buyer in chief for the familial ship-of-state: toilet paper, underwear, socks, butter, Mocha Frappucinos–you name it, I buy it. It’s part of keeping the aforementioned ship afloat. But YG really likes buying stuff, and she does keeps her eyes open for sales. This is a good thing; I want her to be able to shop wisely, regardless of what she’s buying. On the other hand, just because something is cheap doesn’t mean that we actually need to buy it.

YG: But it’s on sale. See: five for ten dollars!
Me: Yes, but I really don’t need five bottles of almond butter no matter how inexpensive it is. No one in the house eats almond butter. Dad and Sarcasm Girl are allergic to almond butter.
YG: But it’s on sale!
Me: Move along. Nothing to see here.

And so on.

She’s particularly fascinated by the way using our loyalty cards at the supermarket gets us savings. I have tried to explain to her that this way the store doesn’t have to give sale prices to everyone, just to the people with a Safeway (or Albertsons or Vons or Ralph’s) card. You pass a display that says “Almond Butter, five for $10!” (and in wee tiny print “with Safeway Card”) and if you use your card you spend only $2 for a jar of stuff that normally costs $5.29. But what if you don’t have a Safeway card? If you’re just breezing through town for a convention and have to buy almond butter and you don’t have a Safeway card, you’re going to get stuck paying $3.29 more than the locals.

When I get the sales receipt there’s always a total telling me how much I saved by using my Safeway card. On a $50 bill, I often have a reported savings of $20, which gives me the spurious buy pleasant notion that I’ve been a virtuous shopper. There’s also a tally of how many deli sandwiches and purchases at the in-house Starbucks I’ve logged and thus my eligibility for free sandwiches and coffee. Which means that they’re tallying everything I’ve bought. Somewhere in the bowels of Safeway Central there’s a computer with my entire purchasing history on it; perhaps they use this data to determine what sells at my neighborhood market. Do they share my household taste in cereal and ice cream and cleaning products with the Department of Homeland Security? Report on trends in nutrition based on my purchases? Will my shopping record outlive me?

But Younger Girl is on to the next aisle, where 1.75 quarts of ice cream (the container formerly known as a half gallon) are now two for $7, and she is happy to report that if we buy six containers we’ll be saving $10.50, and we will eat all that ice cream eventually.

And so, alas, we do.

OK Go are a Grammy-nominated rock band from Chicago and Washington DC, best known for their singles “Get Over It”, “A Million Ways”, and “Here It Goes Again.” They are also well known for their geek rock outfits which include waistcoats, sweater vests, ties, shirts and smart trousers such as khakis, office trousers or chinos which they use when performing in reminiscence of bands such as Weezer, They Might Be Giants and hellogoodbye. Influenced by artists like Cheap Trick, Raspberries, Fugazi, T. Rex and Queen, OK Go shares management with They Might Be Giants, another band with whom they toured before signing to Capitol Records.

However, outside of their fanbase, they are best known for the extremely popular music video for “Here It Goes Again”, featuring the band performing dances on eight side-by-side treadmills. MTV had rejected the idea for a music video for the song, so instead, the band improvised a video using eight treadmills from the local gymnasium free of charge. The music video was done in one take and was uploaded to YouTube, where it has received well over ten million views.

– From Wikipedia

Now, if you haven’t seen this, you’re probably blind, deaf, or dumb, or not on the internet but just in case you haven’t, go ahead, click through and watch it. I’ll wait–I have more to say about this.

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My parents were raised on farms about thirty miles apart in deep East Texas. They didn’t meet until they were adults and living in Beaumont. Thirty miles was a chasm back then.

We lived in Venezuela when I was growing up, but we flew back to the States a couple of times a year for extended vacations, usually during summer break and over the Christmas holidays. We’d often spend much of that time on Harper Land, where my grand-parents farmed, about ten miles outside of Hemphill. My mom’s family would usually come up to her parents’ place, too.

I had a lot of relatives: four grand-parents, twenty-two aunts and uncles. Six (eventually, eight) cousins on the Harper side, more than twenty on the MacDaniel side. I even had my own personal sister. I knew them all quite well during childhood, and our families often visited back and forth after we returned to Texas in 1959.

We ran wild on Harper Land, with the kids getting turned loose after breakfast and brought back in well after dark. We played together, hunted together, went on trips together. Harpers seem to have dominant genes. All the kids looked like Harpers, and were generally bright and had strong, bouncy personalities.

They were my blood, my family. We still got together often on Harper Land as I got older, though my sister Cheryl and I were the only ones who became hippie freaks, so we were distanced from that redneck culture. Gradually, I drifted away, though we’d still go up on Christmas holidays. They still felt like family.

Mom and Dad built a house on their piece of Harper Land after he retired, and Cheryl and I drove up a couple of times a year to hang out with them and the rest of the family. Still rednecks, drinkin’ and sittin’ around the fire in the pasture, talking late at night. Pyromania runs deep and hot throughout our family.

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Teresa over at Making Light blogs:

It’s a disco-era cover of “Apache”, and from the very start it’s terrible beyond human reckoning. After that, it steadily gets worse.

So, I went into it with high (low) expectations and it started out so bad that I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse.

I was wrong.

The Tommy Seebach Band. I am deliberately not posting an image. From the comments on YouTube: “Make it stop, make it stop, oh God, make it stop.” Pretty sure we’re not talking lesbian subtext here.

Click here. If. You. Dare.

Note, I have deliberately not set the following categories: Music, Art, Dance.

While I again contemplate which of many fascinating things to chat with you about today, I’d like to post what may be the best dance sequence I’ve ever seen. You should full-screen it if you have the bandwidth.

It’s not just the rockin’ song. Or the gorgeous costuming and cinematography. Or the sinuous, seething mass choreography.

It’s the subtext.

The scene is supposedly about these two women telling each other how wonderful the other one will be as a wife for Mustache Guy. They’re all generous and warm about each other’s prospects with him.

But Mustache Guy doesn’t have a clue, because, if you see the scene clearly, as I do, it’s obvious that they’re both actually hot lesbian babes hooking up.

That’s a hot lesbian babe mating dance if I’ve ever seen one.

Come to think of it, all the other dancers are also hot lesbian babes. Just watch the way they move in lubricious synchrony.

The mind boggles about what’s gonna go down later on that evening, after the movie filiming is over.

I fell off the wagon last weekend.

No, not like that. I started playing World of Warcraft again. Yes, I’m back on the WoW tit.

When I started working on a project last summer, I decided I couldn’t WoW and write. For the last six months I’ve been WoW free.

Then Burning Crusade came out.

Bud, that demon trickster and WoW-ing cohort, began saying things like how great the new expansion was and how cool it was that you didn’t have to do raids anymore and you could level again. (Okay, how many of you did I just lose?)

I broke down last Saturday and installed both WoW and Burning Crusade on my computer again. I got on to play about 11PM. It was a ridiculous amount of fun.

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OK, this may be too much sharing, but whatever. I’ve been pondering the phenomenon of graffiti.

I love street art. I love how it takes something kinda ugly and stupid—blank or dirty walls, sidewalks, annoying advertisements—and turns it all into something beautiful. This British artist, Paul “Moose” Curtis, is particularly interesting, because he achieves his effects by removing stuff, not by adding it. His “selective cleaning” efforts have been written up in numerous places.

British authorities aren’t sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. “I’m waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks,” he jokes.

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Set dresser David Ritchie was pronounced dead on the scene after a large piece of frozen sand and gravel fell from the top of a wall at an outdoor set that he and three crew members were dismantling in frigid winter temperatures.

Another crew member was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries and kept overnight for observation.

“He was loved by everyone on the crew,” said a colleague of Ritchie, who was 56. “He had a wonderful, gentle spirit.”

–Variety

Mr. Ritchie, 56, was a veteran of the movie industry, with credits on movies as diverse as New York Minute, The In-Laws, X-Men, The Family Man, The Corruptor and Simon Birch.

A friend said he was a smart and witty person who was popular with his colleagues.

“It’s an absolute fluke,” Barry Horsley said at the scene. “He was a very, very kind man. . . . It’s a loss for the union and a loss for the city.”

–The Globe and Mail

The set they were dismantling when this horrible accident happened was for Jumper, the movie based on my 1992 book. They’d wrapped for Toronto on the 19th and were just doing that ordinary stuff after, the dismantling of the set–clean up.

And someone I didn’t know died working on something I helped create.

I’m not responsible, obviously, but the least I can do is say, I saw that you died. You do not pass unnoticed and without regret. I’m sure your wife and daughter and friends are devastated but I just wanted to say I noticed, too, and I’m sorry.

The Eat Our Brains constitution clearly states that I MUST post on Thursdays.

Trouble is, I’m empty today. Utterly. I am a drained bucket. I am the crushing void beyond the Event Horizon. I am a cornhusk from which the tamale has been removed.

In short, I got nothin’. Zippo.

Yet I am constitutionally required to post, or face God knows what sanctions. My fear is that punishment may be meted out by our Founder, which would probably mean being trapped in a painful Aikido hold for hours while being forced to listen to him sing “Louis Louis” (the unfortunate version of “Louie Louie” he learned as a youth) over and over again.

So I’m going to take a lesson from every other blogger on earth who has no worthwhile content of his or her own . . . and simply post links to OTHER, genuine content.

My twist to the ruse is that each link will be presented as a gift to one of my fellow Brainiacs, since all of these links were suggested by previous posts on this site.

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Props to Hovmod at KVR for digging this up:

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You Shook Me All Night Long

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The tragic thing is that the structure of the song is so quintessentially rock ‘n roll, that I still found myself tapping a toe to it.

I’m ashamed.

EDIT: Okay, I had to go hunt this down.

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The Real Deal

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I feel better now. Thank you for your indulgence.

There are a lot of foods I didn’t like as a kid that I like now. When I was a kid I would have happily survived on mashed potatoes and ice cream. I wasn’t a picky eater. I’d eat almost anything except liver and lima beans. I’d still happily survive on mashed potatoes and ice cream and I still don’t like liver, but as I grow older, I crave more and more intense flavors. I like things spicier, saltier, sweeter. I look for novelty in my food. Over the last couple of years, allergies have decreased my sense of smell, so my sensitivity to taste, I suspect, has been reduced. I have become, in the words of my friend and fellow foodie Pat Stansberry, a flavor whore.

I have a very good friend, an artist. She said to me one night while we were talking about art that she envied me my love of cooking and of food. She’s slim. I’m not. She picks. I wolf things down. I suspect she’s a supertaster.

Supertasters have more taste receptors on their tongue than the average in the population. About 25% of Americans are supertasters. About 50% of the U.S. are normal tasters and about 25% are nontasters—which doesn’t mean that they can’t taste anything, it just means that they need more to taste. For supertasters, the world is full of overwhelming tastes. Lots of vegetables taste bitter. Supertasters tend to have strong reactions to alcohol, Brussels sprouts (which are bitter, sometimes enjoyable to normal tasters and very bitter to supertasters) cabbage, coffee, grapefruit juice, green tea, kale, spinach and soy. They can also have strong reactions (sometimes pro and often con) to chilies (capsaicin) and cilantro. Although there is something going on with cilantro. Part of the population loves it and part of it thinks it tastes soapy.

I am curious about people and taste. Sometimes I gently quiz friends and acquaintances about their preferences for salty and sweet, olives, chocolate and potato chips. Tell me a little about what snack foods you have in the house and I can probably make you a pretty good meal. I can make you a good meal if you’re a supertaster, too. But I probably won’t like it as much as you do, because as I head closer and closer to the nontaster end of the scale, I’m going to find the whole thing a bit…bland. While you are probably finding tastes, good bad and indifferent, that I can only determine at a much larger scale.

There’s a couple of tests for supertasters, including an easy, if not very scientific one by the BBC.

If you are a supertaster, just let me know before you come over for dinner. That way I’ll know to lay off the fish sauce, the ginger and the Brussels sprouts.

I won't be watching the State of the Union address tonight. I feel guilty about it, because watching the State of the Union seems like something an informed citizen should do. But...no. Ever since the 2000 election I have been unable to look at the face of the current president of the United States. I mean, I could look, but after a while my brain slides away and I find myself waxing the floor. I can listen to him speak, although all my synapses spark wrongness with every word I hear, and at some point I’m apt to start muttering (or shrieking) at his plans for my country. The folks here at Eat Our Brains who know me personally know that this is not like me. And I never had this reaction with other presidents–I watched Nixon like a hawk (well, he bore watching, God knows), and Reagan (with some fascination at his acting chops) and could form entire and cogent sentences critiquing their policies. George Bush? Not so much. Not at all. He gives me the creeps on a molecular level, even before the policies and opinions come into play.

And yet, I know there are women who find the president, not only watchable but sexy. Will they be watching the State of the Union and admiring the president’s manliness and power? Will they be listening to what he says?

Okay, I don’t get Fabio or Brad Pitt or Justin Timberlake, either (and I think Ian McKellan is the sexiest man alive, regardless of which team he plays for). But George W. raises distaste to a level of flight or fight for me. I’ll read all about it in the paper the next day, and that will have to do.

So, if we were to put a drug out that killed or seriously harmed thirty-two people for every one it cured, there’d be some pretty extreme reaction. At the very least there would be lawsuits, there would be FDA recalls, and lots and lots of juicy news coverage.

Now, to complicate things, there are people out there who were really, truly cured by this drug. They’d be dead or horribly disabled without this drug. And there’s a huge population of people out there, who want to keep this drug in the medicine cabinets–because the syndrome that this drug cures is very well known and in the news a lot. But there’s a good chance, an overwhelming chance, that the drug in their cabinet will do active harm rather than help someone.

Okay, now lets complicate things even further: if you are properly trained in the administration of this drug, particularly if you’ve taken advanced training, the drug has a higher chance of working. But a very small percentage of the people who want this drug in their cabinets are willing to take this training. In fact, keeping this drug in your cabinet increases your chances of being harmed by the syndrome, fourteen times.

Let’s go over the numbers. First of all, 1 cure for every 32 failures. If you keep this drug in your home, you are 14 times more likely to be harmed by the syndrome than cured by the drug.
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