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The late U.S. President Gerald Ford has been at the receiving end of snide remarks from so many corners.
Here are two amusing potshots at Ford, both from LBJ:
* So dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.
* That’s what happens when you play football too long without a helmet.
Just in case U.S. history was not your favorite subject in school, LBJ (1908-1973) was U.S. President at the height of the Vietnam War.
Our mail-carrier a.k.a postman delivered the latest issue of the New Yorker (August 24, 2009) yesterday.
And with it arrived the review of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Inglourious Basterds by David Denby.
For Tarantino acolytes, the news is not good.
You see, Denby’s review of the movie is not positive.
Here’s an excerpt from the last paragraph:
The film is skillfully made, but it’s too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys get to pump Hitler and Göring full of lead), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated. Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque.
Desi journalist Rafat Ali, a respected figure in U.S. digital media circles, put out a blog post yesterday that sees little hope for music startups.
An engineering graduate from the Aligarh Muslim University in India, Ali is the founder of PaidContent and other digital media blogs that were sold last year to UK’s Guardian Group for $30 million.
Here’s an excerpt from Ali’s post:
The more I think about it, the more I see the music start-ups space as a dog that won’t ever bark..err…sing. The MySpace-iLike deal—and the price that iLike got—is a perfect example of what will continue to shape all of the online and mobile music startups. As I see it, there are endemic structural and cultural reasons for it. The first part, something that has borne out over the last few years, is obvious: that margins in music downloads are horrible for anyone without iTunes scale (and even that’s not growing rapidly), and that music labels are the choke point for most of the startups in the download space. Then, the other part about ad-supported music startups that we all instinctively know: too little ad money sloshing around for too many startups and the economics of ad rev share don’t work out well. Plus, there are too many interested parties trying to leech off money at every stage of the value chain for this to ever scale.
No, folks.
It’s not Samsung, Sony, Sharp, LG or Panasonic.
It’s Vizio.
Vizio has maintained the top dog status in the second quarter too, going by the preliminary numbers from market researcher iSuppli.
According to iSuppli principal analyst Riddhi Patel:
Vizio continues to benefit from its combination of full-featured, value sets with its high-volume retail channels. The company seems to have found the right balance between features and price that appeals to many consumers .
Vizio claims over 300% Full HD 1080p year-over-year growth and 101% quarter-over-quarter growth in 55″ HDTVs.
Is Vizio big in India?
Back when we used to live in India, it was all Onida, Videocon, Keltron, Uptron et al. We guess many of these companies have fallen by the wayside and don’t even exist anymore.
Who are the big TV players in India?
Have LCD and plasma TVs made significant inroads in the Indian market or do tube TVs still rule the roost? Here, tube TVs are dead as a dodo.
The big question, folks.
Will the mucho anticipated Kanthasamy turn out to be another charming Anniyan or a tedious Sunniyan a la Bheema?
The answer to the $$ question is nigh on hand.
Anything less than Anniyan would be unacceptable.
After a gap of some two odd years, we rewatched Anniyan yesterday.
And what a charmer it turned out to be even though we were seeing it for the second time (something we seldom do).
Thanks to director Shankar and actor Vikram, Anniyan is a continuous series of fine moments. Here are a few, some of them really comical:
* When Ambi gives the love letter to Nandhini’s parents instead of handing it to the girl he desperately loves
* When the police officer Prabhakar explains to his mother why he’s not crying over the horrible death of his elder brother (the railway caterer) Continue reading »
With the release of Vikram’s Kanthasamy imminent, we decided to revisit one of our favorite Tamil films – Anniyan.
Directed by Shankar and featuring Vikram, Sada, Vivek and Prakash Raj, Anniyan was a landmark Tamil movie.
More for Vikram’s powerful performances in triple roles and less for the different but weird story.
We just popped the DVD into the tray and watched a few minutes of the movie.
Ambi (Vikram) has just returned home from the morning prayers at the temple, where he’s distracted by the presence of the beautiful Sada teaching a bunch of young girls.
As our advocate for consumer causes (yes, that’s our Ambi) is heading toward the court on his moped, plonk falls a gob of saliva, the result of careless spitting by a passing cyclist.
Ambi is incensed.
And we espy the first signs of rage building up over one man’s gross insensitivity toward another, a rage that turns into a bloody carnage through the course of the movie.
No, it’s not a Robin Hood role that Vikram dons in Anniyan, but that of a vengeful, merciless slayer of the fiends in human garb.
Now if you please we’d like to get back to our movie.
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