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.

That’s a round-about way of saying I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater today.

Movies based on video games generally tend to miss expectations, but happily, I have never played the video game that this movie is based on. If you haven’t either, then here’s the gist: a magic dagger turns back time and uses some magic sand to fuel its time-circuits (okay, I was just kidding about the time-circuits). You can figure out the rest.

Here’s the important thing to note about movies that involve time-travel: no matter what happens, you can’t take it at face value because sooner or later some bloke will come along and undo all of it. And when the only thing stopping you is some lame threat involving sand-storms across the world, no one really gives a second thought to changing time as they please. Now if someone had said the entire space-time fabric would come unravelled causing the Universe to implode, that would have made them sit up and pay attention…

In case you were wondering, the hero’s uncle — the King’s brother — is the bad guy. And in case you don’t want to read the spoilers, skip the previous sentence. With that out of the way, here are the top four reasons why he’s the bad guy:

1. He is the prince’s uncle. Uncles seldom end up on the good side.
2. The prince claims that he is the only one he can trust. Er…yeah, right.
3. He has a pointy beard.
4. He has a name like “Nizam”.

Moving on, there’s the question of how long the movie really lasted, after all of the time-travel, I mean. Here’s what happens: the Persian army camps outside the city, attacks at dawn, after which the prince accuses the uncle of treachery. In a bizarre reaction, the uncle gives himself away by attacking the prince (why?) and gets himself killed in the resulting scuffle. The prince gets the girl. The end.

Finally, the action sequences seemed a little far-fetched, but entertaining. Now if you weren’t satisfied with this movie, there’s always the sequel. Any movie that has a colon in it and sounds like “X: blah blah” has a sequel coming in the near future.

Interestingly, the movie is completely in 3D, which means the audience needs to wear those special goggles that make things stand out (notice the pun?) The effects are pretty impressive, I must say.

Bolt rates high on the cute-o-meter, just as you would expect of a movie with a dog, a cat and a hamster in it. Add to that a little girl (voiced by Miley Cyrus) who loves her dog very much indeed, and you have the perfect recipe for a lovable Thursday-night-movie.

My opinion about the movie: definitely worth watching. The script and direction combine a passion for the game with light touches of comedy and drama to conjure up a couple of hours of sheer excitement. There are also elements pointing to the personal lives of some of the characters, adding a measure of reality to the story.

I had a dream last night. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent purchase of a laptop, because this was precisely what I was doing in my dream. Not an actual purchase, but I had a large box with the notebook in it, and I was lugging it around, presumably to get it home.

The twist was that in my forgetfulness, I kept leaving it behind at different locations — a classroom, on the road and so on — and each time, I walked back anxiously looking for it. When I left it behind somewhere on the road and then went back to hunt for it, it was returned to me by a passerby — but now the laptop was no longer packaged, and my name was printed (not written, printed) on it.

The good news is that I did get it “home” finally, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a house in real life.