Good lord, they remembered us!

I was in a bad mood today, having had to rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses. To top off the vicious cycle, I decided to put up this splendid and worthwhile list from h2g2. Share and Hate.

• There are 42 laws of cricket.
• Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia were born in 1942.
• Singer Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. So did his mother.
• If you combine the number of dots, or pips, on a pair of dice, there are 42.
• At the time of writing, Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest United States president when he was elected. He was 42.
• Canines have 42 teeth.
• There is a Broadway musical titled 42nd Street.
• 42 was the jersey number of Jackie Robinson.
• If you rearrange ‘tea for two’ you get ‘for tea two’.
• When sending a text message on a mobile phone, to punch in ‘h2g2′ you have to select 4 (press it twice), 2 (press it four times), 4, then 2 (press it four times).
• Tiberius was born in 42BC.
• In JRR Tolkien’s novel The Two Towers, Gimli the Dwarf kills 42 orcs in the battle at Helm’s Deep.
• According to the Book of Revelations, ‘The Beast’ will hold the Earth for 42 months.
• There are 42 lines on each page of a Gutenberg Bible.
• It would take 42 minutes to ride the Gravity Sled.
• In binary, 42 is 101010.
• If you search answer to life, the universe and everything on Google, the calculator function will display ‘42‘.
• In the 42nd Street subway station in New York City, there are large, white tiled columns with pretty 42s on each side.
• Scientists calculated that the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands, is 42. (However, it will not stay at that rate always.)
• An E-ELT, European Extremely Large Telescope, was built to probe the universe. It is 42 metres in diameter.
• Washington was the 42nd US state to join the union.
• Bill Clinton was the 42nd US president.
• There were 42 Soviet missiles based in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• The Orion Nebula is otherwise known as M42.
• Element No 42 in the periodic table is molybdenum, a metal.
• The numbers for the computer in the TV show Lost are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.
• There were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus.
• 11 February is the 42nd day of the year. Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February, 1847.
• A day on Uranus lasts 42 Earth years.
• Rosa Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man.
• Catch 22, the novel by Joseph Heller, has 42 chapters.
• Queen Elizabeth II is the 42nd sovereign since the Norman conquest.
• The tallest building in London is Tower 42.
• There are 42.194988 kilometres in a marathon.
• To create red light, light has to reflect off water at a 42 degree angle.
• It takes light 10^-42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton.

And with that that being that, I leave you in agony.

Proof that the movie critics have…lost it. A few years ago, the almost shunned a real good movie and gave the award to gay cowboys. Did the same this year. Here’s the full list of winners at Oscars 2008. And boy has the jury gone against public sentiment. Johnny Depp (Rach’s fave drunkard) was the front-runner for Best Actor, but didn’t win (I heaved a sigh of relief); but even Ellen Page (for Juno) was the front-runner for Best Actress by a long margin (and I was rooting for her), and they gave it to someone who was at way at the bottom of everyone’s list. The Bourne Ultimatum, quite deservedly got Best Editing.

What really shocked (and irritated) me was Best Visual Effects - which went to The Golden Compass! Huh? Come on, people, Transformers was way more deserving to get this award (among the nominees). Which brings me to my other point - the movie with THE most path-breaking visual effects, that is, 300 (yes, the same one on why exactly it rocks to be a human with a dick) wasn’t even nominated! What the f***! No doubt Transformers was good, but it was nothing ‘revolutionary’. I mean, did you know that in 300, certain scenes were hand-crafted frame-by-frame in Photoshop (on a Mac, if you must know) to match scenes in Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name?

I think the problem we have here is that the critics live in a world of their own; and whenever a movie comes out which the mainstream audience actually relishes, they just itch to chuck those out and choose something out-of-the-ordinary. Simply to prove that they’re jury members / critics, and what the public likes can’t possibly be something they like.

BTW, Woohoo! Lindsay Lohan won too, the Razzies, that is. Her I Know Who Killed Me set a Razzy record of *eight* ‘wins’! Defeating the likes of established actors like Eddie Murphy. In fact, she got two Worst Actress Razzies! She won something at least! [blows a raspberry]. Here’s what Razzies chief John Wilson said about the TWO awards:

“It’s appropriate that it’s a tie, because at the end of the movie, you don’t know if it was one person or two people, or are they twins, or are we as mentally ill as the screenwriter and director.”

PS - Ratatouille got Best Animated Feature Film. I was supporting Surf’s Up (because it had penguins in it).

A Times Now news story recently speaks of some colleges in Tamil Nadu, where boys and girls apparently aren’t allowed to talk / look / shake hands / eat with each other; you can read the story here.

OK, now this is way weird. ‘Saving Indian culture’ and ’stopping people from *straying* off’? LMAO! That’s rich. What I find even more weird is that some people actually berated Times Now and praised the colleges! Man, I wonder used to happen earlier down South if this is the condition in the friggin’ 21st Century. I mean, suspensions? Making people drop one year? OK fine, some places may have separate dinner mess’ for boys and girls (our school hostel does), but separate staircases? This simply takes the cake.

It’s at times like these when you really think that people like Anuj are right that drastic steps need to be taken to teach some people rationalism.