Today, I will firmly stick to the latter stance, that a little rain never hurt anybody. After all, rain is nothing but water falling from the sky. Look at the bright side — in a few years’ time, it will be falling space-junk (like forgotten satellites) that you need to worry about. If you’re lucky, it will take a good snap of you from up above, that your friends will tag you with on Facebook once it irrevocably damages your face. And yes, I will let this sentence be, leaving it on an ambiguous note.

Do you realize that water falling from the sky is no big deal? If you are reading this and are not named Garfield, you are almost certainly not a cat. That probably means you take a shower everyday (with water), wash your clothes (with water) et cetera. So what’s there to complain about? Live with it. Get wet. Enjoy it!

In fact, maybe — just maybe — you could even use the weather to your advantage. The next time you need a shower, just wait till it starts pouring and take a walk out in the open instead!

Now this rain phenomenon starts looking interesting…let’s see if we can take its usefulness a step further. Why wash your clothes at all? When you walk out in the rain, just make sure you’re wearing your dirty laundry. Another problem solved.

What, did I hear someone say “detergent”? Stop whining — there’s enough chlorine in the atmosphere to poke holes in the ozone layer over the Arctic — that’s certainly enough to bleach your fabric. That’s close enough, you know.

And hey, now you have a good reason to argue for climate-change as well. This just keeps getting better and better. I’m sick and tired of watching doomsday movies about the Earth’s climate going berserk, where some divorced scientist dude figures things out but gets laughed at in the beginning only to be redeemed later, and everyone turns to him to fix the world, which can only be done by building a series of ladders from the Earth to the Moon through an asteroid belt, and a banal happy conclusion is thrust upon us whereby some unimportant sidekick character dies, the scientist dude gets reunited with his ex-wife, and the kids continue to exist and do and say annoying things ever after — but hey, you can’t have completely happy endings, you know?

This brings us to movies — another thing everyone seems to like to complain about. “That movie really sucked!!” Boo hoo. I for one, have found a great use for Hollywood’s bad movies, much like one can use dung as manure and stop complaining about it.

The general idea is this: you find a mediocre movie to watch online — you will find several of these for free — and then you watch some of it based on a formula: ten minutes from the beginning, and then two minute clips, skipping ahead fifteen minutes at a time until you reach the end. The ending is not important. All in all, you would have watched about twenty-minutes of this movie, and gotten an idea of the names of the characters, the plot (which is generally as obvious within the first ten minutes as a billboard studded with neon lights on 8th Avenue) and how the movie is likely to end. That brings us to the main event: reading the popular user-reviews on IMDb, which will now make sense since you know the plot and can identify the characters.

Now, it is important to choose the movie carefully. For instance, avoid the kind of movies where everything takes place in the dark; that’s just plain boring. Also, don’t select movies that have little dialog; those are bound to be based on some Pulitzer-prize-winning novel or the other, and you will always find people who rave about what is unarguably a perfectly bad movie. In fact, the best movie candidates are the ones which have both male and female characters in it (distinctly so), not one of them mumbles too much and looks ugly at the same time, and the movie has an IMDb rating between 5.0 and 6.0.

So there you have it — a perfectly wonderful forty-five minutes extracted out of a mediocre movie on some rainy day. Ah…I love this weather.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I opened the door, not because I wanted to welcome her in, but because I was curious to see what she looked like.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I lured her in, knocked her out with a baseball bat and confined her in my dungeons. Serves her right for walking into a stranger’s apartment like that.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I was pretty excited and welcomed her in, but all she wanted was a glass of water. Bummer.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. I told her I’d had enough of personifications and slammed Mr. Door in her face.

***

Opportunity knocked on my door the other day. Yeah, right.

First, do you recall this scene from [enter your favorite soap opera here]? One of the characters receives a parcel or a letter from the mailman. She signs for it with no haste whatsoever, engages in some not-so-witty banter with the mailman and finally holds the letter (let’s just assume it’s a letter) in her hand.

No, she does not open it.

Instead, she thinks aloud, “Who could this be from? Hmmm…I wonder — could it be from my dear old aunt? Or my dear old nephew who lives in a distant country and never writes? …” She continues in this vein until you scream at her, “Dammit woman! Open the letter!!” (Well, actually that doesn’t have any effect on her because she can’t hear you, and she continues long after you’ve lost your cool.)

Funny, eh? Well, forget about it because it’s not really relevant to what I was trying to say.

Anyway, after having spent the whole weekend waiting in anticipation to pick up my copy of Towers of Midnight on Monday, when I finally went over to the mail-room to pick it up, it wasn’t there. After some investigation, it turns out that the package I had collected from the mail-room on Friday and had never bothered to open (under the assumption that it was a bunch of ink cartridges for my printer), was, in fact, the Towers of Midnight, delivered one business day earlier than I had expected.

So there it was, sitting in my living room for two long days, while I waited for Monday to arrive.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out I never ordered the ink cartridges.

Normally, scamsters would build such websites in order to trick people into giving them their usernames and passwords (thereby allowing them to empty their bank accounts) but these guys did no such thing. Instead, they went around the town asking people what they thought of their wonderful achievement.

The police was sure this was a crime of some sort, but they didn’t know what to charge them with, because they hadn’t attempted to defraud anyone. Finally, they ended up being charged with “phishing for compliments”.

So where was I? Ah, Google Voice. Like I said, I don’t care much for Google Voice, but Google transcripts are a different matter altogether. I love ‘em! They’re a constant source of entertainment for poor jaded souls like yours truly. That’s not to say yours is a truly jaded soul — that’s absolutely not what I meant, but sometimes I think I should get people to call me up simply to have them leave a voicemail and get Google to transcript-ify it, and voilà! — there’s a constant fountain of creativity bubbling forth from the offices of Google. Here’s a teaser — read it quick before Google decides to copyright it^*!

Hey, I don't know a little bit always, it's me those times but I have everything. Conflict of the anything and if you could We're not break down. So, hey Festival of your clients. What Well.

* In the event of Google claiming ownership of copyright on the aforementioned transcript, under no circumstances shall the humorous text published herewith be construed as acceptance of said ownership, or indicate a predilection to accept said ownersip, notwithstanding a lack of claimed humor, perceived or otherwise.

Now, potatoes can be cooked in different ways, but no matter how you do it, its core ingredient will always remain unchanged. You can’t cook potatoes “badly” — that’s a paradox. It’s a bit like saying your ketchup tastes different just because you put a different pizza under it. I mean, who notices such things?

Back to the story: it all began with me having a sudden desire to eat Potato Curry. The logical next step, which I deduced instantly, was to aggregate the ingredients and create it. With this intention, I brought out my frying pan and poured some oil into it, heated it up -

Wait.

I had forgotten about the onions. Onions have a guarded nonchalance in their outlook towards everything. They just sit there for days until you’re forced to ask, “Now what do I do with you?” Some would even classify this as passive-aggressive behavior, but that’s pushing off a lot of your paranoia to the onions. But the key point is this, potatoes don’t need onions — you can make it with or without them — but if you don’t use the onions with your potatoes, what they heck are you going to do with them? I once had a bunch of onions that sat around for many many months; I think they eventually became a little softer than the average onion but looked no worse than before.

Now you could argue that this is simply because Potato Curry is the only thing I am remotely interested in making, but since I’m the one narrating this story, I’m going to have to shut you up.

So there I was with the uncut onion. I turned off the stove and sliced up one half of it. By this time, the onion fumes had conveniently made their way around the rim of my glasses, and my eyes had begun to water. Understandably, I was in a bit of a rush, and hastened to add mustard seeds to my nascent Potato-Curry-That-Wasn’t-Yet-Potato-Curry.

Okay, that was too much haste. My frying pan now had in it, a fistful of mustard seeds. In case you’re wondering what the big deal is, that’s a lot. Naturally, once you put mustard seeds in oil, it isn’t very practical to wipe off the oil and put the seeds back where they came from. At least, this isn’t considered good form.

Believe me, I have nothing against mustard seeds, but to me they’re optional. The last time I made Potato Curry without mustard seeds, I hardly noticed. But when you have a fistful of them sitting in your frying pan, it leads you to look at things differently, wonder about things you haven’t wondered before.

For starters, I assumed that the best option would be to chug along and cook it, my Potato Curry With Lots Of Mustard Seeds. No big deal. But then would I have to add an equivalent amount of urad dal (Vigna mungo)? My Potato Curry would then consist of equal volumes of potato, mustard seeds, urad dal and onion. No! — that was just crazy.

I eventually decided in the next split-second that everything else should be added in the normal proportion. The mustard seeds was a problem that I hoped would go away if I stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. But problems that you ignore tend to have a way of gently reminding you of their presence by banging a frying pan over your head. Mustard seeds in oil are a problem even in small numbers, especially when they have a lighted stove underneath. As a mob, they’re even more erratic.

So there I was, adding the onion to the mix when at least one kamikaze mustard seed shot out from the pan and attacked. My quick reflexes weren’t very helpful for the onions, which looked on sullenly as I tossed some all over the stove. Fortunately, the mustard seeds were quite cowed by that time, being fried in oil and all that.

Thirty minutes later, I ate my Potato Curry. I didn’t really notice the mustard seeds. I mean, who does?

There isn’t really a happy ending to these stories. If he happens to be a bad guy, he’ll invariably get himself killed in some rather stupid way, like allowing someone to put a stake through his heart. If he’s a good guy, he’ll live a long lonely brooding life — that is the essential romance of the plot – until he kills the bad guy in some stupid way, like putting a stake through his heart. After that he’ll happily continue to live a long lonely brooding life.

On a side note, I don’t recall having seen many good gals – woman as the protagonist — in these kinds of stories. I guess they just aren’t suited for such depressing roles, or maybe that stuff just isn’t marketable. I’m not sure how many actresses other than Kate Beckinsale can pull off the “depressed-yet-cool” act.

So now that we’re on the topic, how smart are the immortals anyway? The last time somebody asked, I couldn’t remember what I had for dinner the previous week, but these guys – the immortals – always have flashbacks of ancient memories popping into their heads at some crucial times and lending the audience the much-desired “aw..” moments. I mean seriously, just because these guys live forever doesn’t mean they remember everything, do they? Even R. Daneel Olivaw had to have his memory-banks archived to tape (in a manner of speaking) on a semi-regular basis.

And then of course, there’s the mechanics of it all that’s interesting, to say the least. Take ghosts, for instance. I think it’s fairly well-established that ghosts retain their souls but not their brains. On the other hand, even religious people will agree that the brain does the thinking, even if the higher aspects of humanity – free will, consciousness etc – may be controlled by the soul. So what’s doing the thinking and the remembering for ghosts?

Or maybe — is that why the don’t-do-anything-stupid switch is turned off?

This is just the first part, but all the parts are available.