Craig’s the youngest Bond, but is he also the best? I certainly think so.
Critics place Connery right up there, but have one ever seen a fatter Bond (see Goldfinger), or a more balding one? Connery was neither the handsomest, nor the best while carrying out stunts, and in the first few of his Bond (mis)adventures, he looks completly out at sea. Why, I’d prefer Alfred Molina over Sean Connery for the part.
On the other hand, look at Craig. He is young, an excellent actor (he proved this in Munich) and CERTAINLY NOT BALDING or PAUNCHY. In Casino Royale, he again delivers a gritty performance. All those stunts couldn’t be easy, and that now famous torture sequence? THAT is acting,and it’s here that Craig pips Connery as the best Bond. True, he was helped a lot by a decent script, but that doesn’t take anything away from the intensity with which he did the part. Others played Bond, Craig BECAME Bond.

P.S.: Don’t listen to the (not so )Great Quizzard if he tells you that Bond is neandarthalish. After all, what kind of neandarthal drives an Aston Marin or uses cell phones to track down baddies? And what’s all this nonesense about Bond not being the best spy??

FORCE Fest 2006 was held at Apeejay School, Sheikh Sarai on 28-29 November 2006. Short story - we came Overall Runners Up! And, since this is my blog, I gotta mention we came runners up in the quiz too.

Now the long story, for fans of my incredibly long posts. This was an event that was make-or-break for the Code Warriors team, since the school administration had made it clear that we weren’t going to have Code Wars if we didn’t win something. Apparently, Exun 06 wasn’t enough for them! Force was an event where we had to participate in all events for an overall position, so we had a hard time hunting down members for all, but we finally stitched together one, hastily albeit because we’d mixed up its timings with certain other events going on right now.

Day 1 saw my regular quizzing partner Prannoy unable to turn up since his mom didn’t allow him to. I had to go with this talented youngster we have in CW called Vivek, who although is in class 8, really IS a good quizzer, at least in the tech domain. The quiz and the crossword were on at the same time, so we like most other teams, had to hop from one to the next.

First there was the quiz, in a computer lab with PCs from the era when dinosaurs ruled the earth. The prelims looked more as if they were some sort of subjective-type exam to some cheap computer course, rather than a quiz paper of a school that has produced ace quizzers like Ankit Sud and Dhruv Chopra. It was easy though, and we wrapped it up pretty quickly, to rush off to a primary lab for the crossword, where the highly intelligent organisers thought that we all could comfortably sit on chairs for nursery class students (it was their primary lab).

Crossword prelims really left me bored, the worst of its kind with nothing cryptic at all (those ones are really fun to figure out, and I like that). It was all straight forward, that to sucky 3-4 letter ones that flit around like bugs. We came first in this though, but it really sucked.

The crossword finals were held the same day (after a one hour delay), and it was TOTALLY mismanaged. Initially the organisers said that there were going to be four rounds, but even after clues were remaining they suddenly cut it shot three, effectively ruining our strategy of not going in for the bigger words (we were waiting for confirmations to our hunches as the letters filled in), and we had all those figured out. Organisers, in the first round, had made all the clues visible (technically that is, projection was bad and blurred), rather than the regular blind method. Suddenly some bright kid then had the idea in the second round to shift the crossword app window to hide the clues. The crossword finals seemed rigged, with KR Mangalam World School coming first by a huge margin, while others were far behind. Finals were pathetic too, with no cryptic clues, either you knew it, or didn’t, and there were some ambiguous ones too. KRM, a school which knew nothing at Exun, WarP or any other event suddenly knew what Fios (a Verizon service nobody else in the quizzing circle has heard of, and believe me, the people I’m talking about are no fools), .env, cron etc were. Even the seating was suspect, since rather than making us pick chits to decide, they did it randomly. I still have neck pain though, due to the organisers who made us sit incredibly close to a giant screen, that I had to strain my neck to unimaginable angles.

To our horror, the story repeated itself in almost every other event, where far more deserving schools, and here I’m even ready to accept ones other than DPS VK, didn’t get positions, while KRM did. Fortunately, from sources, we found out some rigging was going on, and an SMS as proof from a KRM guy to back it up.

Day 2 started off with the quiz finals, which were equally stupid. I certainly didn’t expect such a pathetic quiz, and I was looking forward to Ankit Sud conducting it, but I guess couldn’t come due to exams. Really stupid things, like MCD website, company headquarters with logo visible, kid-stuff questions like the three-finger salute, and a rotten scoring system where only one point was given per correct answer in the acronym round (when all others had 10 points, it doesn’t make sense to have one-pointers). It was all on luck, that DPS Mathura Road got most of the passes, sitting right next to a weak team Ramjas, and a freaked out (at the stupid questions) MIS. It was a close finish in a quiz that was so dumb. DPS RKP were totally fooling around in both the crossword and the quizzes, with Manas making funny noises and regularly (almost) insulting the organisers. ROFL at his funny noises and comments still.

I guess KRM and / or Force members got scared after the news circulated around, and I guess day 2 was pretty fair, with the best teams winning events. CW team bagged a few others too.

However, we NEEDED the overall to convince the school for Code Wars, and in a historic event, DPS Vasant Kunj, Mathura Road, and RK Puram got to together, with Mothers International to complain about unfair judging in events, and we told their computer HoD. We went to the extent of applauding and cheering each other while the individual prizes were being distributed, something that generally does not happen. Gotta mention though, winners got pen drives.

Then came the time for the overall winners, and we waited anxiously as to what the school had decided. Force showed that they would stand up for truth, and the overall position went to deserving winners MIS, with DPS VK getting the Overall Runners Up trophy.

A thanks all branches of DPS, and MIS for supporting us. Congrats to MIS too, for performing so well everywhere despite having very few members. Looking forward to an Ankit Sud quiz next year (he’s promised me). And do look at the overall trophy we got. I think that clinches Code Wars for us. That, plus the CD-RW that the school will be getting from this event, and I think that now there should be NO reason for the school to turn us down. After all, we won overall at Exun, and did pretty well at WarP too.

…and then, some MORE spam! Hell, that’s what’s been happening to my blog. I just keep getting an irritating 70kb long anonymous comment daily full of links to adult sites, colleges, warez sites and whatnot. Plus with Blogger crawling like a tortoise, it’s a pain in the ass to get these big comments deleted.

The most irritating thing is that although I use CAPTCHA, image verification, for my blog comments, I always end up getting spam. I tried unsuccessfully by removing it to see what happens, and it simply opened the spam floodgates. And you know what, there are so MANY blogs around, that I visit, that DON’T keep image verification enabled, and still end up getting no spam…!!!

Maybe it has something to with the fact that 75% of my blog’s visitors come via search engines, so maybe spam bots find my blog a ‘tasty’ target. No offence meant to Hormel Foods Inc…

I think I’m not the only one to notice this, but of late, Blogger.com has been really slow, and when I say that I mean a pace which would make an insomniac sloth fall off to sleep. Posts take too long to publish, comments appear late, changes made take a loooooooong time to get republished etc etc. Guess Blogger’s a victim of its own success, with so many of the blogosphere being on it.

However, things like spam blogs, where bots churn out kilobytes of trash are things which really bog down Blogger’s resources. Also, Blogger’s policy of not deleting inactive blogs may sound nice, but in the long run it really hurts users. I’ve seen so many blogs which just to have a few, sometimes just one, post since say 2004 and they still exist. There should be a limit to how nice they should try to act, because in the end, real users like me suffer. It makes financial sense for them too to purge their databases of stuff nobody bothers to read anyway and which are no longer being updated.

It’s also the duty of Blogger users not to create empty blogs with one post or something. It’s a free lunch around here, so be kind to your host…