Gamine: word not found - Singlish Dictionary

I think I live only on weekends. After a whole week of absolutely unremarkable existence with bouts of existential philosophizing, the weekend was a blast.

On Saturday evening, Vasanth gave a treat celebrating the taking down of the ‘Seeking Work’ billboard outside his apartment. He’ll now be working at Micron while I contemplate putting up that billboard outside my place. Anyway, we went to Thai Express for dinner which was great. Sriram was there too and it’s always fun pulling his leg. I believe some ex-NTU chaps read this blog too. If you know him, ask him why he’s gone veggie these days. ;-)

Did I mention that I have now memorized the item numbers of the three dishes that I can order at Thai Express? Just kidding… I can’t even memorize my own phone number.

Sunday was spent at ECP, kayaking and roller skating. This was my first time kayaking and since I can’t swim and don’t relish the idea of dissolving in salt water, the first few moments were very extremely scary. Quite on the same level as that time when I accidentally stepped into territory freshly marked by a mommy tiger. Except that the kayaking was very real while the tiger bit happened in a dream after reading Life of Pi. When getting into the water, the first few meters are the most difficult since the waves keep pushing you back to the beach. I don’t know if there’s a trick to this but I had to put my bulging biceps to full use and row really hard to get away from the sands. Once at sea, it’s a really great experience. Lying down peacefully under the sky, Coldplay wafting from the pub on the beach, your boat dancing to the swell of the sea, your reverie interrupted only when JLo’s jarring voice starts playing over at the pub.

Anyway, this out of land experience was followed by an hour of skating which wasn’t so good ‘cos of the insane crowds at ECP, what with this being a weekend - a National Day weekend at that.

Dinner was at Komala’s, the highlight of which was papri chat which Sharad generously (aka foolishly) swapped for my gulab jamuns. One more thing, Komala’s serves excellent sambar idli, something I found out at lunch earlier.

There were National Day related fireworks at night which we couldn’t see clearly because of a problem which is called, in my highly technical circle, the absence of a line of sight providing qualitatively acceptable visual imagery.

So that was the weekend. I have no photographic evidence whatsoever to corroborate any of that.

What else.

I got this spam on Yahoo four times last week. Although Yahoo diligently stashed it away into Bulk Mail, I am obsessive and want all my stuff clean. The mail started out with a funny meme along the lines of don’t reply to this ‘cos no one checks that account. Instead, mail me at something@hotmail for further enquiries. So I shot off an email to abuse@hotmail asking them to send away said hotmail account on the first ship to Siberia. They replied in a day saying the deed was done and that I could track the shipment on FedEx online, if I so wish.

So? you ask. Where’s the trademark twist in story or brilliant humour or soul wrenching irony that you’ve come to associate with all my writings? Here’s the kicker, my friend: today I get a mail from hotmail asking me to take a customer satisfaction survey. Spammed for reporting spam!! And no sir, this is not a one time survey as far as I can tell - I actually have to opt-out to stop receiving such mails in the future. What a world we live in.

Okay, some links for those who made it this far. Couple of sites where they put up music videos: antville and submarinechannel. I couldn’t see many ‘cos my net speeds have been pretty spotty these few days. Just saw a couple of videos by Michel Gondry. The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be one is really great. You can see the same brilliant sense of visual style he recently showed in Eternal Sunshine…

Apparently, the Google guys ran out of beer at some party and now the Yahoo guys are poking fun at them with this easter egg. It’s been blogged about so much that now, it’s the blogs which come up as the first few results. Google, sadly, hasn’t replied yet. ;-)

One more neat blogging experiment: RoommateFromHell.

PS: Coming up with titles based on the wotd is harder than I thought it would be.