I keep telling myself I should be sadder,
but my exuberance is spilling over!
Is my gaurd, my wall, slipping?
Have I forgotten, I’m still in mourning?
It’s been just two years and a quarter.
The pyre still burns steadily over.
Besides, why should I rejoice?
Yet, I can hardly still this voice!
Once more, a nothing will be unsung.
Just a verse, is not a song.
To prove the total lack of logic behind my song-in-the-head theory, and/or my stupidity and/or confusion, I have had random insane songs stuck in my head lately. Golden Earring, Pyaar Ka Side Effects, Rang De Basanti, Woh Lamhe, Yuva and Guru, when I should have something like Misty Blue or Ye Jeena Bhi Koi Jeena Hai, Lallu!
This is why I like Rahul Bose. Even when he does a crappy movie, with some random person, the result is hilarious and wonderful! I loved this movie. I had been trying to convert a wannabe phirang pal over to bollywood latley, one of my favourite soapboxes. I gave up when he did’nt love this movie! If you have any kind of sense of humour, if you are one of those always complaining about my lack thereof, watch this movie 😀
Its probably a cliched, hackneyed theme. Nothing new in the story, but it didnt need the novelty. Something about the way it was carried off was fresh and real and full of “oh my god I’ve been there moments”. My favourite was bose’s pal who hates to change his underwear. Or the one where the same friend tells a heartbroken bose, freshly ditched by sherawat, that ofcourse she’ll take him back, because she has already spent three years ‘training him’. Or on a more serious (?) note, when he tries to forget her by dating again, but cant get it together with anyone else, and one of his new girlfriends tells him, you ran away for fear of committment, but inside your head, you already are committed to her.
Not to mention the awesome soundtrack. The fact that he was a DJ reminded me of hi-fidelity. And the fact that he is narrating it, as well. There are shades of them in each other, but ofcourse, even rahul bose cannot ever come close to cussack for
me (you are what you like, not what you are like). Even otherwise, ‘so exasperating but cannot help loving him’ scale, this character is nowhere near the one in hi-fi. But the movie is fun.
Damn. Now I’ll probably have “most of the time” on my head all day tomorrow!
To prove the total lack of logic behind my song-in-the-head theory, and/or my stupidity and/or confusion, I have had random insane songs stuck in my head lately. Golden Earring, Pyaar Ka Side Effects, Rang De Basanti, Woh Lamhe, Yuva and Guru, when I should have something like Misty Blue or Ye Jeena Bhi Koi Jeena Hai, Lallu!
This is why I like Rahul Bose. Even when he does a crappy movie, with some random person, the result is hilarious and wonderful! I loved this movie. I had been trying to convert a wannabe phirang pal over to bollywood latley, one of my favourite soapboxes. I gave up when he did’nt love this movie! If you have any kind of sense of humour, if you are one of those always complaining about my lack thereof, watch this movie 😀
Its probably a cliched, hackneyed theme. Nothing new in the story, but it didnt need the novelty. Something about the way it was carried off was fresh and real and full of “oh my god I’ve been there moments”. My favourite was bose’s pal who hates to change his underwear. Or the one where the same friend tells a heartbroken bose, freshly ditched by sherawat, that ofcourse she’ll take him back, because she has already spent three years ‘training him’. Or on a more serious (?) note, when he tries to forget her by dating again, but cant get it together with anyone else, and one of his new girlfriends tells him, you ran away for fear of committment, but inside your head, you already are committed to her.
Not to mention the awesome soundtrack. The fact that he was a DJ reminded me of hi-fidelity. And the fact that he is narrating it, as well. There are shades of them in each other, but ofcourse, even rahul bose cannot ever come close to cussack for
me (you are what you like, not what you are like). Even otherwise, ‘so exasperating but cannot help loving him’ scale, this character is nowhere near the one in hi-fi. But the movie is fun.
Damn. Now I’ll probably have “most of the time” on my head all day tomorrow!
The big story in December was a paper (What’s a mother to do? The division of labor among Neandertals and modern humans in Eurasia) published in the journal Current Anthropology, by Steven L Kuhn and Mary C Stiner, two anthropologists at the University of Arizona. What the paper essentially says is that modern humans outlasted Neandertals in the survival race because modern humans developed division of labour among sexes, whereas among Neandertals even women and children joined in the big hunt for large game – a perilous lifestyle that put their reproductive core at risk. The link above only leads to the abstract, you have to be a subscriber to read the full text, but I could swear I saw a link to the free full text somewhere, probably on a pirate site. I closed it then to read it later, and I can’t find it anymore.
The paper was first covered by Nicholas Wade in his science column for the New York Times (Neanderthal women joined men in the hunt) in which he summarises:
Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.
Soon, the story was picked up by bloggers, and word was out, in a tongue in cheek way, that ‘feminism killed off the Neanderthals’.
Not everybody agrees, however. John Hawks, in his excellent blog writes:
But first, let me just say this: ten years ago, we were arguing about whether Neandertals could hunt at all, or whether instead they were ineffective scavengers depending on carnivore handouts.
I suppose those days must be behind us, because now we read Neandertals were such committed big game hunters that they needed their females and kids to hunt along with them, which fatally compromised their ability to find and exploit small animals and plant foods.
Apparently it took some tropical mojo to make modern women realize they could eat plant foods like every other primate.
And then in another post goes into a detailed criticism of the Kuhn – Stiner hypothesis. He concludes:
To the extent that we can compare with living and prehistoric humans, there is no support for the idea that Neandertals went extinct because their women spent too much time hunting. There are positive reasons that refute this idea — most importantly, the demonstrated dietary flexibility of Neandertals and other archaic humans, which would have enabled Neandertal women to exploit a systematic plant and small animal collection strategy if it actually had increased their fitness. The fact that they did not do so is probably a reflection of their ecology, not their social organization.
It remains difficult or impossible to refute mere possibilities on the basis of the archaeological and fossil record. But we should remember that such mere possibilities are not testable hypotheses.
Certainly, some Neandertal women may have hunted along with Neandertal men. Maybe they were Neandertal Amazons who severed a breast to better thrust spears into roaming bison. After all, we know that they were capable of amputating limbs, so why not?
The “why not” in this case is, obviously, that Neandertal Amazons are a product of fantasy. Sure, the fossil record cannot rule out the possibility that they existed. But comparisons with our everyday experience and our knowledge of variation in other species both tend to indicate that such a curious adaptation would be unlikely.
The same is true of Kuhn and Stiner’s model. A deerstalking Neandertal woman is by no means impossible. Maybe they spent a lot of time hunting, who knows? The problem is that there is no evidence that they did so.
I hope to see more on this.
One of my favourite artists is the seventeenth century French painter Claude of Lorrain, who is best known for his landscapes. One could say he is one of the founders of that genre of painting. I remember viewing his landscapes as if one could almost walk through them. Go right down that trail, take a left at that shrub, go round that lake, dip your feet if you want, then take that worn out path that goes between the trees and you can either go over that hillock, or take a right turn and walk right back where you started. It’s a thrill to view a well-executed Claude Lorrain landscape. (Of course, my favourite landscape painter is Ruisdael, because of his brooding, depressing skies).
Why do landscape paintings appeal? Or landscape photographs, for that matter (although they often take the form of sappy desktop wallpaper and screensavers). Apparently, they touch a nerve deep within our brains that reminds us of our primeval hunting grounds, when our ancestors were hunter gatherers.
Which is why golf is such a popular sport among males (the hunters) and not so among women, who were mostly gatherers. That’s how the theory goes. Says Steve Sailer in an April 2005 article in The American Conservative: ” The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men) is that they look like a happy hunting ground—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands.”
He goes on:
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, “I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses ‘beautiful’ is that they look like savannas, down to the scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea.“
Tasty hoofed animals would graze on the savanna’s grass, while the nearby woods could provide shade and cover for hunters. Our ancestors would study the direction of the wind and the slopes of the land in order to approach their prey from the best angles. Any resemblance to a rolling golf fairway running between trees is not coincidental.
Chocolate Amer 