Phantastic Phour - Phart I

The test was successful. Crack a Thoom lives!!

December 2nd was a day to remember. It had been a while since I went to a concert, having recently missed the opportunity to see Porcupine Tree live. So news of Phish coming to the city, received about 7-8 weeks earlier, was music to my ears.

Awesomely trippy music, to be precise.

It so happened that the pathetic collection of (barely functioning) nerves I introduced in my last post (who shall be referred to as UPoC (Useless Piece of Crap) from now on) turned out to be very heavily into Phish as well. Which, in hindsight, is not surprising at all.

Originally, UPoC was given the responsibility to search, negotiate, buy and protect with his life, the tickets for the show.

Agreeing to this plan was one of the bigger mistakes I had made in my life till then.

To cut a long story short, UPoC's single (worthless) credit card, entirely in keeping with his general lifestyle, stopped functioning. I was told this tragic news in appropriately mournful tones approximately 2 weeks later. By this time, naturally, cheap tickets had gone.

But the interweb is a wonderful place. To his credit, UPoC managed to find a website having reasonably priced tickets for decent seats, out of which I found one which was suited to our purposes. Bought these, got it delivered to my place and then triple locked them up in an armored safe, which I then lowered deep down in the unholy depths of Roth Pond and enchanted so it would only open for insanely handsome Oriya/Jharkhandi biomedical/electrical engineers who had recently been to Italy.

OK, the last bit was kinda-sorta-made up. But I did lock them up.

The day of the concert then came <childish giggle>.

This will be covered in Phart II.

NP hard

This is a test post.

Things have been going well.

Recently discovered that an otherwise worthless dharti pe bojh "friend" has a blog. For some reason he calls himself Nanga Fakir on the blog, despite being neither nanga nor a fakir.

Well, the fakir part I'm not very sure of.

Anyway, this waste of DNA somehow managed to conjure a very good quote about the meaning of life. Such as it is.

NF: <*slightly tipsy perhaps*> Fine. Life is meaningless. So you just proved the problem is NP hard. Now what are you going to do with it? Acting cool, jaded, blasé, superior and invoking the meaninglessness of life as a justification for the aforementioned behavior is the same as (read isomorphic to) feeling satisfied and smug about the helplessness that the intractability of the problem induces. You've gotta fucking come up with a provable, well functioning heuristic. That's what's non trivial. That's what a True Ninja would do.

One of the few times I have seen this creature being useful (if the quote is truly original. But then, what is truth anyway?).

The advantage of having crying babies

A full two weeks of cavorting on beautiful beaches and active volcanoes (with the characteristic smell of rotten eggs) (because of the sulphur fumes) (view photos here, read the blog here), drinking wine, and assimilating large amounts of stochastic differential equations and other arcane material into my brain came to an end on 26th September at around 2 pm Eastern Time, as I finally stepped off the (frankly ordinary) Alitalia plane and into JFK.

As I breathe in the familiar smell of rain and traffic, I hear a distant whine, not entirely unlike speeding ambulance-sirens. In general, if you hear a siren anywhere inside New York, you simply dismiss it as white noise (there's always sirens in New York, its the American equivalent of the traffic horn back in apna Hindustan). However, yours truly was still dreaming about the crystal clear blue sea water in the beaches of Salina, and so the white noise instantly became a pile-driver in my skull.

Turns out the whine was a baby crying.

I have no love for crying babies. I got slapped a lot when I was a kid, which initially made me cry a lot as well, until I started getting slapped for crying. I realized soon enough that to not cry was the safest way to not get slapped, and consequently there would be no reason to cry ever.

I know. Very zen.

Anyhoo, this little guy was doing just about everything in his power to make a mockery of his parents' pathetic attempts to appear unaffected by his moaning. And we hadn't even crossed the little transfer-bridge from the plane to the airport yet. It was then that I realized, in a moment of surprising awareness, that there would soon be a very very long and very very slow immigration queue to conquer. And there was a good chance that I would get suicidal if I was too close to the damn baby while I was trying to conquer it.

In a flash, I increase my speed. Crying-Baby and Co. soon sense the fear in me, realize I'm trying to be far ahead of them in the immigration line, and realize they should be going quicker, too. They try to increase speed, but alas, they are hindered by the dual curse of family-hood: their progeny and their luggage (and they had a lot of luggage). A little light bulb shines in my brain and Supreme Commander Hypothalamus Dash congratulates General Left-Brain Dash on his presence of mind and infinite wisdom.

Cut to Immigration queue, which is, as expected very long, very slow and very crowded. Crying Baby and Co. are of course, very very far behind me, which is great since I can now start dreaming of beaches again. Which I do.

Until, to my utter shock and humiliation, I see Crying Baby and Co., go smiling across me, ushered by a true-blue US immigration officer, to the front of the queue! They even gave me a little smug smirk and a wave.

  And the little infant, who I assumed was the direct cause of the officer's outpouring of pity, has one of the widest Lord-Voldemort grins I have ever seen on his face.

Moral of the story: Never try to outsmart babies. Slapping them is much easier.

PS: I don't really slap babies. Too much work.