Always wondered what the soporific Chem prof meant when he/she said “Sodium reacts violently with water” and all?

If you did, this youtube channel is worth a dekko, where scientists post a video for each element of the periodic table. Pretty interesting stuff it is, lame nerdy jokes notwithstanding.

If only I was taught Chemistry like this … sigh

(link via Boingboing)

Brilliant, intricately animated, colourful, very entertaining. And very funny. Watch Kung Fu Panda, preferably in a theatre.  I loved it!

… mais seulement un peu

Just completed a Level 1 Part 1 class (aptly called Survival French) where I attended toutes les sessions. Feels pretty nice. Tres bien! (Tres bon?) actually.

Hopefully I’ll join the next Part soon - French is fun!

Watching this movie made me realize quite a few things -

1. Will Smith is like the Hollywood equivalent of Akshay Kumar (and not the other way round) : he’s a super dependable, hit-movie-making-machine who is adored by people across all age groups. He’s happily married and well settled, is action-comedy proficient and has the salt-n-pepper stubble accented ultimate cool-dude look going good for himself.

2. Charlize Theron should do more mindless roles (like in this movie) whose sole demand is that she look pretty. In fact, she should be banned from taking up any roles which cause her to look ugly/ nasty. It’s not just a crime, it’s a waste of infinite beauty and gorgeousity. Enough of trying to prove that you’re a good actor. We get it.

3. As for the movie - it tries to be funny and different, and succeeds in both but only partly.

4. The special effects are good, but then that is the norm in most Hollywood movies these days.

5. I liked the movie, but it didn’t make me ecstatic.

6. This is not really a review. And the Charlize Theron pic below is just because.

Hugh: Douglas picked a buttercup. Why people leave buttocks lying around, I have no idea.

Doesn’t make too much sense? Try reading it in a ‘propah Bridish accent’.

LOL!

From this, at 4:42-

Fry and Laurie are awesome!

Mikael Ballack - ze German who seems to be destined to finish second every time- and Matt ‘Bourne‘ Damon look so similar, it’s freaky!

If only Ballack had Jason Bourne’s awesome abilities, the Germans would had celebrated winning the Euro Cup. And my prediction would not had fallen flat on its face … sigh

On the topic of Matt Damon: There’s this movie he co-wrote with his best friend Ben Affleck (and co-won an Oscar too) called ‘Good Will Hunting‘. The movie is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Every character is played to perfection and the mathematics/science is sufficiently ambiguous to keep everyone interested. The only thing I could possibly object to was that Robin William’s hairy arms seemed at times a wee bit too conspicuous.

The part in the bar where Will Hunting (Damon) makes fun of some guys to impress Skylar (Minnie Driver) and defend Chuckie (Affleck) is awesome. But the one scene (link) in the movie (possible spoiler alert) which I especially like is where Chuckie tells Will to stop his self-pity crap and embarks upon what is possibly one of the best friendly-yet-enlightening and concise-but-expletive-filled monologues ever heard.

Aside: I’ve always wondered why the term is called spitting image …

The early 90’s was the phase when a certain bong by the name Kumar Sanu and his sinuses (d)rooled over the Hindi Music Industry. That was a glorious phase of Hindi Cinema, one I look back upon quite nostalgically.

But this post is not about that phase. It’s about the wonder called Youtube and the ridiculousness of this page which had me laughing till I turned pink.(TSFW)

Clearly, there’s something I don’t know that the people at Youtube/Google do to throw up the encircled video (click image to enlarge) is thrown up as the second-most related video. Explanations are endless, so is the amazement

So there’s a guy who has the following characteristics -  

- muscular, popular, spectacular, single, dashing

- owns fast car(s), is filthy rich, friendly, smart

- ambitious, musically inclined (plays the guitar), holidays in France, extremely popular and kind

- can’t dance.

And people are making fun of him solely because of the 4th point - that and probably because his parents, in what must have been a pretty rare bout of extreme drunkness, went and named him Pappu. Some folks have even created a controversy over this (link via this), which is quite ridiculous - probably even intentionally planted by Aamir Khan, who talks to the media only when he has a movie release around the corner

I never knew being able to dance was so important. This song might have been written by the aam junta (average person) to make fun of the popular kid in class everyone secretly hated, but all it does is just make me plain depressed. I want to be Pappu! I’m 25% there already !!

Most movies crave for hype. Aamir was released without any hype or real promotion, but it picked up purely on word-of-mouth publicity, which is probably the truest test of how good a movie is. But by the time I watched it, the movie had been so trumped up, it didn’t seem to be that good.

<digression> I’ve often heard people say mouth-to-mouth publicity instead of word-of-mouth, and I have without fail imagined lifeguards in red bikinis coming to rescue folks. Every time. </digression>

The actor is a revelation - one of those few actors to go from TeeVee to MooVee quite effortlessly - although I must confess I’ve never quite seen any of TV series. The characters are played quite brilliantly by all actors (mostly Marathi actors, which is a sad reflection on the current state of Marathi cinema. Again I must confess, I don’t watch it much ). The story is quite standard but the plot is very nicely written (my English Lit. prof. must be so happy I finally understood the difference). Calling this movie a copy of Phonebooth is like saying The Thin Red line is a ripoff of Saving Private Ryan. The qawwaali in the movie is quite nice too.

And yet, the movie leaves you unsatisfied. Why? I explain with the help of my source of daily rozi-roti i.e. MS Excel.

Fraction of Movie completed	Stage in the movie	Nice? (Normalised w.r.t. Initial Hype)
-0.2	Initial Hype - Awesome!	1
0	Start (Missed first 10 minutes)	0
0.2	The first twist (Taxi scene)	0.5
0.4	The Dongri scene (filled with crap)	0.7
0.6	The tale of the two sisters	0.8
0.8	Retrieves bag (Refer Video)	1.1
0.9	Final twist in the bus	1.3
0.95	The slo-mo in the end	-0.1
1	Fini	0.7

In true analyst, here’s an overdose of the same information - but this time as a graph. 

Clearly, Average (0.667) < Hype (1). Hence proved.

I still give it 3 stars. And I do think that people should stop inserting redemption for kaum (community) in every movie with Muslim characters (e.g. Shaurya).

Ed: I’m not alone in the disappointment/ sense of being let down. PFC and J Ramanand concur too, apparently.

Hero is unassuming/way-over-the-top (one of the two extremes). Hero is brilliant and yet quite caring in either case.

Hero has a major screw up and ends up affecting himself directly or indirectly.

Gamma radiation, Krypton, Mutation, Transmorgification, Radiation and such exotic-sounding terms are thrown around at will to justify anything and everything.

Hero says ‘This is my gift and also my curse.’ Or he says ‘Angry. Rwaaarrw’ and it’s understood that that is what he means.

There is a bunch of absolutely irrelevant thugs/ goons/ school bullies out to generally pain the Hero. They get their a$$es kicked major time in the process and we get to snicker ‘lyoosers!’ at them. They also serve the dual purpose of giving the Hero some much needed match practice.

Hero tries to get rid of his boon/curse and succeeds in doing that… but not quite. Then some Maniac gets hold of those/ equivalent/ better powers and becomes something scarier, nastier and with worse mouth odour, which makes him a menace to society and Greenpeace protesters.

Maniac goes on to kill many people but for some reason never actually harms Hero’s gal. The relationship between Hero and his Damsel can be best described as It’s complicated.

Hero returns to fight Maniac. Maniac dies (but is not directly killed by hero) or is at least rid of his powers/abilities. Hero gets to kiss his gal at most once and then he’s off to do the noble thing - i.e. live a life of celibacy and make up for it (well not literally) by screwing bad guys.

Make Hero slender, supple, net-savvy and with a convoluted dressing sense - you get Spider man.

Make Hero hairy, bulky, a monkey and generally pissed off at everyone in life - you get King Kong.

Make Hero hairless, green, bulky with absolutely no dressing sense and generally pissed off at everyone in life - you get the Incredible Hulk.

As far as the actual movie goes - nothing new, somewhat entertaining, good visual effects, lots of destruction, weak jokes, predictable story.

Imagine your face while trying to calculate 1793/41, or when you’re quite constipated. Then imagine yourself doing a maanja lappet (tying up your thread after losing your paper kite) with all fingers outstretched while having the above face. That’s my rating for the latest Hulk movie.

(Nice review this one )