Why in pluperfect hell did you pee on the corpse?

I just watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and it was fantastic. Fabulous writing, excellent acting by Robert Downey jr and Val Kilmer and I think I'm in love with Michelle Monaghan:

Hotel

For the past two days there had been an annoying clicking sound in my room and I couldn't work out where it was coming from, it was somewhere behind the wall. I mentioned it at reception before going to work today. When I got back this evening it was blissfully quiet. Turns out the person in the room next door had their ceiling fan on full and that's what was making the noise, although why they need the fan and the air-conditioning I don't know, maybe they were eskimos. Anyway, they changed the fan and it's now all sorted. They really do look after you well here.

That may have something to do with the fct that I was due to meet the COO of the hotel chain this evening. He is down from Mumbai and wanted to meet me as we use the hotel a lot to see what I thought. He was a nice enough guy and while I didn't say that the singer in the lounge was rubbish, I did say it was a bit loud. We were sitting right in front of the 'singer' while he was busy doing horrible things to elton John songs, I think the COO got the idea.

Anyhow I then had a run (I'm on five KM almost every day) and now I'm going to watch Final Destination 2 on HBO. G'night

Clouds

Not very exciting for most people but there have not been that many clouds here in the past two months. This is the start of the rainy season.

MySpace (eeeeeeemoooooooooo)

I've created a MySpace account to see what all the fuss is about. The layout of the site is horrible and it does seem to fall over a tremendous amount.

However it is a very good way to find new music. So far I've discover the fab Tara Busch and Fields. I'm going to waste a lot of time on that site, I can tell.

Stuff

On Tuesday a friend from Luxembourg gave me a call and suggested that we have dinner on Tursday, turns out he was in town for a week visiting some people. We ended up going to Karavalli and having some superb sea-food on Thursday and then to Harima on Saturday for a fairly obscene amount of Japanese food. 'twas nice to hang out with somebody else and great to see the old tart again.

Otherwise it's been grey and overcast for the past two days, the monsoon is almost here. And we seem to be having more powercuts than usual.

Big food

I love this site: http://www.pimpmysnack.com/projects.php

This made me giggle.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Food

This afternoon I suddenly had an urge for raw fish for some reason so this evening I had dinner in a very nice Japanese place called Harima which is about a ten minute walk from the hotel down Residency Road, just past the St Mark's Road junction. It's in a decaying office block called The Barton Center and you go up to the fourth floor in a very old lift that seems to have half the buttons missing. Once there a doorman opens a sliding wooden door and you are in a lovely restaurant with rough stone floors; a nice circular sushi bar, several small rooms with rice paper walls and mats on the floor. There was one other westerner in there and the rest of the people there were Japanese. The food was excellent and I think I have fulfilled my craving for raw fish for the moment.

I went on my own as I haven't seen the other guys at all today. We had a couple of drinks in the hotel bar last night and then escaped when the world's worst lounge singer started up. I don't know if the hotel realise how much business they are losing by having this sing in public. It drives people away in fits of giggles, holding their ears. Anyway, we went next door to Spinn but that was far too crowded for my taste so I left them too it at about ten thirty. They had been talking about going to some afterhours club in Koramangala, as I haven't heard from them all day, I can assume that they had a good time.

Local news

I thought I'd just share a couple of news items that are in today's paper over here. While India is positioning itself as a world leader in IT, a growing economy and a nuclear power, these sort of things still happen:

Tongue sacrificed: In a bizarre ritual, a woman on Saturday cut off her tongue and offered it to the goddess Kali at a temple in Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh. The woman, Rekha, made the sacrificial offering at a Kali temple in Maholia Sivpar area in the district and the police contingent had to be deployed in the area as a precautionary measure.

Uttar Pradesh is a state in the north of the country, bordered by the Himalayas. Now, quite why the police were deployed I'm not sure. Maybe they were afraid of a sudden rash of tongue removals...

Bollywood sizzler Rakhi Sawant has been booked by the police for 'indecent behaviour' and 'destroying public peace' Sawant had performed at a promotional show here (in Kolhapur) which had to be abruptly stopped after some miscreants went on the rampage, breaking chairs and clashing with security guards while trying to cross the barricades to reach the stage.... "Sawant's clothes were too embarrassing for the public. The commotion erupted after the crowds found her clothes and performance extremely provocative" DSP Shahaji Umap told the Sunday Times of India on Saturday. He said the police were planning to arrest her and bring her to Kolhapur in connection with her case.

She's not entirely unattractive it must be said:


Kolhapur is in the state of Maharashtra which border Karnataka. So, a bunch of boozed up men couldn't restrain themselves and it is the woman who gets arrested for 'provoking' them... There are still a lot of things in this country that need changing but social and cultural changes like that require a lot of time. India is going to continue to be a mass of contradictions for many years to come.

I don't think it's geting enough pubilicity

So, The Da Vinci Code film is getting people upset over here. There is at least one person in Mumbai who is going 'on hunger-strike until death' unless it is banned, one muslim council has voiced support for the Christian groups getting their knickers in a twist over a film, and from reading the reviews, apparently a pretty bad one. Why can't they just let people make up their own minds? Oh, except thinking for yourself is not really encouraged my that many religious groups is it. Gah.

Anyway, the Herald Tribune published their review, which is also negative. But they had this wonderful line: "...Ron Howard's film of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence".

Arf! For the record, I also think that Brown is an awful, awful writer.

The good the meh and the gory

One of the guys from New York brought some films over with him and he's got pretty good taste so I've just watched Saw II and Hostel which he'd brought with him.



Hostel is pretty damn good and quite intense. It's the second film by Eli Roth who I met a couple years ago at the horror festival in Brussels when he was there for with his first film Cabin Fever'. He's a very entertaining loon who obviously loves his horror film. This one starts off as sort of a teen teen comedy type thing with lots of attractive naked girls encountered by two young Americans and their insane Icelandic friend who are traveling round Europe. They find Amsterdam to be a little tame and follow the rumours of a town in Slovakia full of gorgeous girls who just love foreigners. For the fist 45 minutes you follow these guys and it's pretty amusing. The film has been accused of being sexist and homophobic but I can't say I see that. The three main characters are assholes sure, but they don't mean any harm. Soon after they get to Slovakia things turn nasty. Very nasty in fact. Yes, the film has been called 'torture porn' and it is intense (with some truly excellent effects courtesy f the ever reliable KNB) but we keep watching it. Which I think is part of Roth's point, he's not just providing a kick-ass horror film that plays very much on the fear of the unknown, of being a stranger in a strange land, but implicates us in the enjoyment of torture, making us identify with the bad guys at a subconscious level. Yes, Roth is a fan of Takeshi Miike and of course he's not the same level of film maker than Miike but he admits it and even features Miike in a very short cameo. In summary a very good, disturbing and bloody film.



I also watched Saw II and was pleasantly surprised, this too is pretty brutal. There's a scene with a pit full of syringes that, what with my needle phobia, I found difficult to watch. The acting is not great but the story is and I did not see the ending coming at all and loved it.

Finally I watched the last episode of The West Wing. Series seven had certainly been one of the better post Sorkin ones and had some great episodes (how they deal with real life death of one of the main actors was excellent and had me feeling all emotional), however the last episode was not one of the great ones. It was Ok but a bit of a let down really, maybe that was part of the point with the changing of the staff as a new president is sworn in but it didn't effect me the way it should have done after seven years of these characters. Everything finished the way you wanted it too and I think that was part of the problem. The way you want it to finish is not necessarily the way it should have. It didn't excite, challenge or surprise the way it should have. But it's over now and it was generally excellent. Now I just need to wait for Sorkin's new series to start later in the year.

Thunder

It's very difficult to get a good picture of a storm. This is the best that I could do leaning out of the hotel room window. Sorry it's a bit crap, the storm itself was much more impressive, just try and imagine it or something.

Impatient

Warren Ellis wrote this earlier :

Read a draft of Aaron Sorkin's
forthcoming STUDIO 60 ON THE
SUNSET STRIP last night. Nearly
gave up writing. I want to break
that bastard's hands, I really do.

I can wait until the autumn when this is due.

Hulk Smash

Gah, I really shouldn't read stuff like this, it just make me very angry. Why do people still believe a single word this man says?

Saturday night

Today was the birthday of the one guys who is staying here another month and the last night of one of the other guys. We had a coupe of drinks in the bar earlier one which involved me having six measures of gin with two tonics, which was a nice start to the evening.

We then went to a restaurant on Museum Road, about a ten minute walk from the hotel called The Only Place and had a pretty good steak. I had a chateaubriand for 350 rupee, which is about 6 Euro. The restaurant does not serve alcohol but they offered us beer anyway, when they served it the bottle was wrapped up so that you couldn't see what it was and on the bill it was down as 'mocktails'.

Then two of us went to Spinn, the club next to the hotel and it was a lot better than last week, maybe because of the amount I have had to drink, maybe because they had a different DJ, probably a mixture of the two. In any case, there were lots of very attractive ladies there tonight. And no, of course I didn't talk to any of them...

Storm

The weather was lovely and sunny until about four his afternoon when out of nowhere these incredible winds started up and rain started pouring, and I mean pouring really heavily. A tree right next to the office blew down and you could see that even some cars where having trouble in the wind. Five minutes later it was all over. I rained a little later on but nothing like those five minutes.

This weather of course starts to was away the roads and turn the potholes into lakes. The other guys took 90 minutes to come into the office this evening. Going back was not too bad, you just had to avoid the water. Just before Banneghatta road joins Hosur Road you cross a little bridge that goes over what can normally be described as a rubbish dump with a small stream running down the side. This evening it was a fairly healthy river. I can't wait to see what the monsoon is going to be like. This place is going to be chaos.

Food

As two of the Americans leave this weekend, the office took us out for dinner at a very nice place called Samarkand that serves north western and Afghan food. It's a nice place on Infantry Road and obviously also popular with foreigners, I don't think I've seen that many westerners in one place here. Of course my US colleagues think that everybody not Indian is American, despite the fact that there was a huge table of Brits and another of Spaniards...

Rained again tonight, another good thunderstorm and it's very pleasant outside now. But it's time for bed, so goodnight.

LOL ROFL!!!

There's a little magazine a bit like Time Out called CityInfo that has a section about nightlife and this month they have some woman talking about her nights out: "I have done some crazy stuff in pubs around the city. My friends and I once broke some mugs in a pub and sneaked out unnoticed"

She sounds like sooooooo much fun to be with....

Office

My office in not on the main campus but in what they call 'the Towers'. The maximum height for most buildings is four stories which is how tall the Towers are, this is still taller than most buildings nearby. There are two towers, one behind the other; I'm in Tower II which is at the back of Banarghatta Road. Like most office buildings in Bangalore, the Towers have a staff canteen on the roof. This is both a good use of space and also gives some additional ventilation as there is often a small breeze up there.

Basically they just put a metal roof over the flat top of the building, not putting in any walls to leave it open. The roof of course has lights and lots of fans to move the hot air around. There is a small kitchen with a canteen like metal serving counter, several tables and chairs, a small snack bar, a ping-pong table and a washroom. As of course most meals are eaten with your hands, there are always washrooms like this, even in some restaurants, open with just sinks. Tower II serves just vegetarian meals and Tower I serves what they call 'non-veg'. Vegetarian meals are quite strict so the non-veg option could just be as simple as including egg. You can get a nice meal for 25 rupees (about 50 Eurocents).

From the canteen there's quite good view all the way up Banarghatta Road all the way to the centre of town, although there isn't really much of a skyline. You can see the minarets from mosques here and there and a surprising amount of greenery. The huge Acenture building towards town stands out quite prominently and they are building a further extension to it. Just outside the offices are the road works for yet another flyover. These have been going on for months but are supposed to be finished this month. Judging by the progress you can see, I doubt they will manage this, but you never know.

Names

I finally received my company ID card and am glad to see that despite correcting it on the form, I'm now called Brain Eeles. This is at least a slight improvement on the car company who have me down as Mr Brown Ellis...

Hot

The north of the country is currently having a bit of a heat wave and it's reaching 46 degrees in some parts. Down here it's a balmy 34 or so.

I think this is the longest I've ever been without seeing rain, the first rains should be due soon and then the monsoon starts around June. I'm actually looking forward to seeing what that is like.

Secrets

This is one of my favourite sites.

Clubbing

I've just been to a club here and can happily report that it's just as shit as a club in Europe. Far too crowded, music played too loud, overpriced drinks and full of prententious arseholes.

I did see one bloke with a belt buckle that had lots of LEDs on it and which spelt out messages. I don't think he liked me pointing and laughing at him though.

Traffic

Hosur road is one of the main roads out of the city towards the south. It's two lanes in each direction and is always very busy.

Today on the way home it seems that all of the drivers suddenly decided that it would no longer be two lane sin either direction, but that it would be six lanes of traffic all heading in to town. Needless to say, the traffic trying to head south was a little stuck...

History?

Gah, The History Channel is advertising a TV movie about the private Jessica Lynch 'rescue'. The one that was played up by the pentagon using an unquestioning US media as the rescue of a brave young woman. It's since been proven that the official version had nothing whatsoever to do with reality and that the majority of it was staged and blown out of proportion.

So now The History Channel are showing the 'official' version, so it must be true, right?

I wish there was more real journalism out there and that people would question things more

Yesterday we went to Mysore for the day, the guys at the office had talked about organising a trip for us but I guess the Americans couldn't wait so they arranged for the driver to be at the hotel on Sunday morning at 07.30 to take us out for the day. I had intended to go to Mysore for a weekend at some point, possibly by train but thought I'd go along for the day anyway, I could always go back again.

We had a bigger car so that everybody could fit into the one vehicle and the driver was the one the merkins normally have, mine was driving his boss home for the weekend, a 12 hour round trip. I got the front seat, which meant that I got to the full on driving experience. There were a couple of times when I thought I might need clean trousers as he was driving fast and very aggressively. We were going right behind cars, changing from lane to lane, overtaking on the left, on the right, between cars all the while the horn just kept blowing. The road itself was surprisingly good quality for most of the way. It's been resurfaced and widened almost the entire way there are just a few stretches where the work is still ongoing. On some of the new stretches through villages you can see corners missing from buildings where they were demolished to make way for the road. The rest of the building may still be standing and of course there are people still living in it…

At first the scenery was nothing special but about 40 kilometres outside Bangalore there were the first of these huge rocky mountains jutting out of the plains. They are strange things, not much vegetation on them, just these massive lumps of granite several hundred metres high in a dusty landscape. I didn't get any photos, as we were too busy driving at high speed.

Further along the road the landscape got flatter as we entered the Cauvery River valley. There was a lot more greenery with coconut palms, mango trees, banana plantations and rice paddies. I even saw some peasants using water buffalo to pull a manual plough on their tiny piece of land.

Just outside Mysore we visited Tipu's summer palace:


and the nearby temple complex :

where we seemed to somehow acquire an ancient guide who talked non-stop for about twenty minutes, I could understand maybe a quarter of what he was saying, and then demanded 200 rupee for the privilege. There was a comment from somebody in the group about how it was disgusting that a place of worship was set up to sell things and take money off you. As always I bit my tongue, not mentioning the fact that some cathedrals charge entrance, all churches have donation boxes and most religions have taken money from people since the dawn of time.

Then we went into Mysore proper which seems to be quite a nice sleepy little town. We drove up Chamundi Hill, one of southern India's most sacred sites, with the driver overtaking traffic on blind bends and me praying to whichever gods would listen. The view from the top was spectacular, and there were of course thousands of people everywhere. Being westerners all the sales-people and kids quickly latched onto us, asking the usual conversation started of 'which country you from sir?' Unless you want to find yourself with a hanger-on asking for cash for the next hour, the best thing is to just ignore them and keep walking. There were several people trying to sell me photos of the temples and the view, which seemed a bit pointless as I was in the process of taking photos of those very things… Oh, and there were monkeys and a very large stone bull:




Then out driver took us to a 'craft factory', which admittedly did have some craftsmen working on some fairly nice wooden furniture, but was basically just a hard sell tourist trap. This is pretty common, as the driver will normally get a commission from the shop for every tourist they bring in. The woman running things seemed quite upset that I didn't want to keep looking at things and preferred to just hang out outside watching the world go by. Needless to say, two member of the group ended up buying various items.

Then we went to the palace, which is spectacular. You cannot bring cameras inside and have to leave them in a locker before entering but you can take photos from outside:



There are loads more photos here.

The inside is amazing with beautiful carved ceilings, intricate inlays of ivory on the doors, courtyards and halls. You are not allowed to wear shoes inside and when we got out the ground was so hot that it was impossible to walk very far, you end up just running from one patch of shade to the next!

Then it was time for the long trip back. We did manage to get a puncture just outside Bangalore but it was quickly repaired and we were back just before dark. It was a bit ambitious to try and do everything in one day, but still a very nice little trip.

When I got into the office today, one of the guys asked what we'd been up to so I told him and he looked a bit disappointed. He went on to say that as he'd promised a while ago, he'd arranged for a weekend in Mysore with the company…I though the merkins had checked with him before organising the trip yesterday but apparently not…