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Music We’ve Acquired Lately 6

 Bollywood, Music  5 Responses »
Mar 252010
 
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The music never stops here these days.

Here’s a short list of some of what we’ve purchased lately:

* Crush – Jenifer Paige’s biggest hit has been a favorite of ours for a long time.

It’s just a little crush (crush)
Not like I faint every time we touch
It’s just some little thing (crush)
Not like everything I do depends on you
Sha-la-la-la, Sha-la-la-la …..

* Hum Tum Eku Kamre – Easily, one of the most popular Bollywood songs ever.

Picturized on Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia, this famous number from the movie Bobby is sung by Shailendra Singh and Lata Mangeshkar.

* Smack That – We purchased Senegalese-American singer Akon’s popular number this morning at iTunes based on SI blog reader chennaiarun2007′srecommendation. Mucho like.

Smack that, all on the floor
Smack that, give me some more
Smack that, ’til you get sore
Smack that, oh ooh

* Slumdog Millionaire: This time we purchased the entire CD ($9.99) a week or so back.

Since then, we musta listened to O Saya and Jai Ho a billion times.

Are you reading this, StryngLad? ;)

* Vinnaithaandi Varuvaya: Karthik’s eponymous number from the Tamil movie. We purchased the track at iTunes a few hours back. As we said in our review, the movie is trash but the music is decent.

* Latoo (Hindi): A peppy number from the Bollywood ripoff of Memento. Shreya Ghosal, Pravin Mani and A.R.Rehman are the folks behind the song.

Yes, schmuck we’re talking of that piece of stolen shit Ghajini.

Related Links:
Music We’ve Acquired Lately 5
Music We’ve Acquired Lately 4

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 Posted by at 12:41 am  Tagged with: ,

Bollywood Actor’s New NYC Indian Restaurant Bhojan Runs into Toilet Issues

 Food  1 Response »
Mar 252010
 
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Some people never learn from past missteps.

Notwithstanding his repeated troublesome experiences with the NYC Health Department, Bollywood actor and Indian restaurateur Shiva Natarajan continues to taunt the hygiene police with his antics.

Our garrulous Shiva’s newest Indian restaurant Bhojan has recently been pulled up by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for not maintaining the toilet properly.

Here’s what the NYC Health Dept said in the inspection report:

Toilet facility not maintained and provided with toilet paper, waste receptacle and self-closing door.

By the way, the new restaurant also scored some violations points with its non-food contact surface but passed the inspection, as per the NYC Health Department report.

Shiva Natarajan Responds:

Despite what the NYC Health Department inspection report says, Bhojan owner Shiva Natarajan claims there was never an issue with toilet paper and the problem was actually with the door-stopper in a toilet not meant for customers in the basement of the restaurant. According to Natarajan, the NYC Health Dept. uses broad categorizations while enumerating violations in the inspection report.

Related Stories:

Bollywood Actor Shiva Natarajan Loses Hygiene War at Dhaba NYC

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 Posted by at 12:41 am  Tagged with:

Hooray, Obama Defeats Evil Mothafuckas with Health-Care Reform; Ends Mass Murder in America

 America, Health  17 Responses »
Mar 212010
 
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Update: The U.S. House has voted in favor of the Health-care Reform Bill with 219 Democrats voting in favor and all (178) Republican Congressmen voting against the reform along with 34 Democratic traitors. President Obama will soon sign the historic legislation. :)

Many Americans are worried that a national health care system with universal coverage would be an expensive proposition for the United States. In fact, a better-organized system, covering everybody, would almost certainly cut our health care costs – after all, every other rich nation’s health care system is cheaper than ours. Americans also tend to believe that the private sector can run a medical system for less money than the government can; all the evidence from around the world suggests the opposite.
- T.R.Reid in The Healing of America, P.24-25

Folks, at long last a bright sunny day has dawned for the American people.

A red letter day, if you ask us.

For far too long, America’s evil quartet of greedy doctors, callous insurance companies, rapacious pharmaceutical firms and mercenary hospitals have collectively killed tens of thousands of people every single year by denying medical care to the sick who were uninsured and couldn’t afford the high costs.

In collusion with their scumbag Republican partners and lobbyists, this evil quartet has massacred far more Americans than Osama bin Laden did on that fateful day in September 2001.

Think we’re kidding?

Harvard Medical School researchers have calculated that every year 45,000 people die in the U.S. because they can’t afford medical care. We wouldn’t be surprised if the number is significantly higher.

The numbers of uninsured Americans are growing and we reckon it should be around 50 million today. Not a small figure for a country of 300 million people.

Citing a World Health Organization study, T.R.Reid writes that in terms of fairness the U.S. health-care system is behind Bangladesh and Maldives. How disgusting.

Such is the dark side of the U.S. health-care system.

Healthy Reform
Today, the Obama administration took aim at one party in the evil quartet – America’s cruel, merciless health-insurance companies – and placed a big step forward in providing universal coverage.

Obama’s reform bill ends some of the pernicious practices of the U.S. healthcare system that have made life miserable for millions for several decades and killed several hundred thousand Americans over the years. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 9:49 pm

History is being Made in the U.S. House

 Health, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 212010
 
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It’s 10:19PM ET now and President Barack Obama’s Health-Care Reform bill will soon go to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives where the Democrats have the required votes to carry the day.

After the reconciliation process with the Senate version, the bill will go to President Obama for signature and then become law.

Folks, first step in the long, great march for health-care to all Americans.

As the late Senator Edward Kennedy wrote in his letter to President Obama:

Access to healthcare is the great unfinished business of our society.

The Democrats have proved today that they have a spine after all. :)

The ReThuglican oops Republican scumbags have proved yet again they are worthless pieces of shit. :(

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 Posted by at 9:19 pm

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Movie) Review – Riveting, More So for Stieg Larsson Fans

 Foreign Movies  15 Responses »
Mar 192010
 
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In one what must count as one of the great tragedies of the 21st century literary fiction world, Swedish writer Stieg Larsson never lived to enjoy the fruits of success from  his wildly popular crime novels.

Since most of ye schmucks read so little, some education is in order before we proceed to the movie review.

Larsson is the author of the Millennium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest).

Serious readers of the SI blog will, of course, recollect the Larsson name since we’ve reviewed two of his books on these pages: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who Played with Fire. We just got the third volume – The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – a few days back and will read and review that as well.

Alas, Larsson died of a massive heart attack at 50 just before the first book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published.

Such then are the vagaries of life.

Lovely Swedish Film
Today we celebrate Larsson’s life with the review of the film version of Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

The movie debuted this morning at the Ritz 5 theater on Walnut St in Philadelphia and, folks, the 125-mile drive was most certainly worth it. Every single mile of it.

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, faithful to the novel and featuring Michael Nyqvist  as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as the oddball hacker Lisbeth Salander, the Swedish language film with English subtitles is as wonderful and as gripping as the book.

Agreed, some of the thrill of the whodunit is lost since readers of the book know the ending and the identity of the rotten apple in the Vanger family. But that’s more than amply compensated by the excitement and anticipation of encountering in color on the big screen the characters  you’ve read about in small black print on the pages of a book.

Like the book, the movie focuses on the search for the killer/killers of 16-year-old Harriet Vanger, who disappeared 40 years back from Hedeby island to the great anguish of her dear grandfather Henrik Vanger, the head of the Vanger conglomerate.

In four decades, his missing grand-niece has become the idée fixe of Henrik Vanger’s life and the old man has left no stone unturned to get at the root of her disappearance. But in vain. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 10:57 pm  Tagged with:

Palace of Asia Wilmington Review – Awful Food, Disgusting Service

 Food  No Responses »
Mar 192010
 
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If you let a bunch of sloshed monkeys run amok inside the kitchen and dining room of Palace of Asia Wilmington (DE), you’re likely to end up with better curry and superior service than what woebegone us experienced during our horrid meal at this restaurant.

Folks, to describe Palace of Asia Wilmington as an authentic Indian restaurant would be a gross insult to the magnificent wonder that’s Indian cuisine and a grave injustice to the English language.

Seldom do we visit a restaurant like Palace of Asia where the food and service are in constant fratricidal battle to determine who can inflict maximum pain to the diner.

Want to know our gravamen against the place?

From the dessicated, slothful waiters to the lousy food, the cheap tipping practices and ultimately to the billing snafus, Palace of Asia is a dump.

A disgusting dump, no less.

Plain Incompetent
Try as you may, it’s hard to come up with bozos who mess up even the humble Pappadums.

But underestimate the incompetence of these Palace of Asia jokers only at your peril. They messed our Pappadums by frying it only around the edges and left the center portion incompletely fried.

Such is the relentless attention paid by Palace of Asia’s wannabe-chefs in besmirching the fair reputation of Indian cuisine.

Like at most Indian restaurants in the U.S., Green Chutney at this place too was cold, tasteless and atrocious.

Here’s a healthy dollop of advice to the bozos snoozing inside Palace of Asia’s kitchen: if you are too lazy to offer freshly prepared Chutney to diners, pick some other profession. Sell your blood plasma, wash cars with the amigos or mop the floor at Walmart but stay out of the kitchen.

Out of the kitchen, comprende. Just ensure that your presence doesn’t pollute the kitchen.

Shun the Wilmington Impostor

Art of the Big Lie
Only a fiendish monster would serve the watery, insipid Dal Makhani we got at Palace of Asia.

Guys, cattle wouldn’t sniff at such garbage. No, they wouldn’t. Casting a disdainful snort, the quadrupeds would amble away from this awful Dal Makhani.

And by way of education to those of non-Indian origin lurking around on this blog, Dal Makhani must be the simplest item in the massive pantheon of the sub-continent’s cuisine. Say, the equivalent of making an omelet.

Any schmuck should be able to do that, right? Alas, not the Joseph Mengeles at Palace of Asia practicing their hideous torture on diners. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 9:48 pm

Incredible India 44 – India Takes on the World

 Incredible India  23 Responses »
Mar 162010
 
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Great Indian Shitters

Source: WHO Report – Progress on sanitation and drinking-water 2010 update

Is there anyone out there who still avers that India has not arrived on the world stage.

Folks, if there were any doubts at all about nookulear India’s preeminence in the world the above pie-chart sets everything to rest.

Truly, the 21st century belongs to India!

Mera Bharat Mahaan

Related Stories:
India – A Shitty Country, Literally

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 Posted by at 11:30 pm

Passage of the Day – The Visitor

 Books, Quotes  1 Response »
Mar 162010
 
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And how I despise the average citizen, who settles himself down upon one tiny spot of land with one asinine woman, to breed and stew and rot in that condition unto his life’s end. And always with the same woman! I simply cannot believe that any man in his senses would put up with just one female day after day and year after year. Some of them, of course, don’t. But millions pretend they do.

- The Visitor in The Best of Roald Dahl P. 294-295

Needless to say we completely agree with Dahl’s sentiments concerning the distaff sex. ;)

By the way, The Visitor is another fine story by Dahl.

Highly recommended, guys.

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 Posted by at 6:21 pm

Incredible India 43: Flowers are So Passé in India

 Incredible India  6 Responses »
Mar 162010
 
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(For SI blog reader VJcool)

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls picked them every one
When will they ever learn?

- American folksinger and song-writer Pete Seeger: “Where have all the flowers gone?”

In Incredible India, you don’t say it with flowers anymore.

So yesteryear. So uncool.

Marigold, Champa, Jasmine and Rose – who cares for them anymore in India?

Flowers are out. Their stench is unbearable.

And currency notes are in. Ah, what a sweet smell these crisp notes spread all around them!

Even India’s esteemed netas are now eschewing malodorous flowers for fragrant currency notes.

Take for instance, Mayawati a.k.a Maya behn, our beloved Maharani Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Bahujan Samaj Party leader.

On Monday to celebrate 25 years of the BSP and the 76th birthday of its late founder Kanshi Ram at the Ramabai Ambedkar maidan in Lucknow, Maya behn was honored by her supporters with a garland of flowers Rs 1,000 notes.

Hey, we can smell the fragrance of the currency even here across the ocean.


Her Royal Highness Mayawati
(Photo: UP Govt. web site)

Not for our Maya behn Rs 100 or lesser denomination notes or God forbid the coins that lesser leaders are weighed in not so infrequently in the various corners of Incredible India. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 9:14 am  Tagged with:

Whither Tamil Cinema

 Tamil Movies  45 Responses »
Mar 132010
 
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by SI blog reader Racer44
(Readers: SI’s comments follow this essay)

Having completed over 92 years since its inception (the first silent Tamil movie Keechaka Vadham was released in 1917), it is only obvious that we ask ourselves, where is Tamil Cinema headed? (ignoring, of course, naysayers like SI who say that it’s headed from deep shit to deeper shit).

The decades gone by have rung in many changes, the immense technological advances not the least among them.

As Tamil cinema progressed from the silent era to black and white talkies and later to Eastman Color and the present digital age, the kind of films made also diversified, from period dramas involving rajas and ranis which had their origins in religion and folklore to stories that are more grounded in the reality of today, drawing their inspiration from the life of the common man, whose trials and tribulations they served to document and whose mundane love-stories were blown up into larger-than-life romances on celluloid.

But for the sake of identifying Tamil Cinema’s current course, it should be sufficient if we restrict our gaze to the last  2-3 years of its existence.

Many would agree that these are the heydays of Tamil Cinema, what with Kollywood’s first forays into the adventure-fantasy genre with the much-feted Aayirathil Oruvan, its first full-length spoof in Tamil Padam and very soon, its first science fiction film in Enthiran.

While these are significant milestones in themselves, what is truly heartening is the emergence of a new breed of directors keen on experimenting with hitherto untouched themes and spinning innovative and absorbing narratives out of them.

Arivazhagan’s Eeram, Samuthirakani’s Nadodigal, and Pandiraj’s Pasanga: each of these films is special, in that they not only strike an off-the-beaten-path approach in their story and storytelling but have also struck gold at the box office. None of  the aforementioned films had any big name on the credits, and two of them (Eeram and Pasanga) were directed by debutants.Yet each of these found an audience willing to embrace the envelope-pushing. The advent of the multiplex has contributed, in no small degree, to these films’ success.

In times when an ever-increasing number of movies vie for the same pie, it is the bloated “masala” movies which find themselves forced to adapt in terms of story and setting in order to stay relevant. Audiences worldwide have shown little patience at nonsensical movies like Villu and Kutty causing them to quickly bite the dust once word-of-mouth spreads.

As the average Tamil-movie-goer would say, Matter irukkanum. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 11:23 pm
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