A commenter on Soul Strut’s message boards spots M.I.A.’s D.J. lover, Diplo, showing off his nose-picking thumb prior to her performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
M.I.A.’s Diplo spotted on ‘Kimmel’
Space and Politics
My cruel friends like to tease me. They tell me that by the time I become an astronaut they will be able to buy the ticket for the seat next to me. Bastards. They might be right. Space tourism, though still in its infancy, is full of possibilities. Now and Indian-American entrepreneur from Chicago is trying to get in on the action. From the Hindustan Times:
Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian-American serial entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love – commercial space travel.
Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation called PlanetSpace.
“We are interested in making this a profitable business. I am more interested in getting applause form Wall Street rather than from jet propulsion labs,” said Kathuria who could not become an astronaut as a teenager because he wore glasses.
“The fact is I’ve always wanted to make commercial space travel a reality for the everyday person, and to create a business to make a company profitable.
Apparently I’m not the only one who dreams of space AND politics though. Kathuria is quite ambitious. Googling him led me here. On April 15th Kathuria announced his bid for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois (in 2006).
SF Scene – May 13 / 14; MIA, TieCon & Roe
A couple quick notes for SF-based Mutineers –
- MIA will be playing a sold out show @ The Independent theater in downtown SF this Friday night (May 13) followed by a show at the Fillmore on Sat (tix still available?). If you go, drop us a note @ the tipline with your review and/or cameraphone picts.
- Geek mutineers take note — Tiecon takes place this weekend down in Santa Clara. Registration is still open. The annual conference afterparty is @ Monte Carlo in Mountain View starting @ 830pm on Friday. There’s a guestlist and this stuff has been packed to the gills in years past. I guess if you couldn’t get tix to M.I.A., partying up (or standing in line) with a few hundred desi engineers / entrepreneurs is some sort of a consolation prize.
- Finally, a certain mutineer will be celebrating a b-day w/ some friends @ Roe / Prive in downtown SF, this Sat night starting around 10ish. Come by and say hello. MIA – if you’re reading this, you’re more than welcome to drop by after your Fillmore gig.
Bollycat
Now here are a group of guys who’ve set out on a rather formidable task –
Here we catalog plagiarism and forgotten inspirations in the Indian movie industry. Bollywood, India’s movie industry, churns out over 800 flicks a year. But with all those numbers it’s hard for them to keep up with the creative work. So a lot of movies turn out to be ‘inspired by’ movies from all over, especially Hollywood. And at the rate they are going with good and hit movies, very soon we’ll be seeing a copy of “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. Therefore to keep ourselves, and you people of course, up-to-date with this ever increasing theme, script, scene and music stealing – or borrowing – trend in Bollywood, we have created BollyCat.com. Help us catalog Bollywood’s acts of shame!
The plot summaries & commentary are quick, witty reads – for ex. Kaante / Reservoir Dogs and Hum Kaun Hai / The Others.
I dug around, however, and couldn’t find my personal favorite – Indian Superman – notable because it didn’t restrict itself to merely copying the storyline, music, and costuming but went one better and directly spliced in the special FX footage itself. Bollywood sure knows how to economize.
For the curious, Manish recently pointed me at a clip of this landmark film available on the web where Darmendra saves a planeload of 70s-clad desi’s from tuxedo-clad hijackers.
DOH. My bad. I knew this sounded a tad too familiar. Previous SM coverage of Bollycat by Apul here. Continue reading
Times of India haiku with pictures
Inspired by the stellar reporting of The Times of India. Shine on, you crazy hacks.
Monkeys acting like real jerks to cadets
India’s National Defense Academy complains that it’s frequently harassed by a gang of no-good monkeys:
It says the langur monkeys are disrupting training exercises, attacking cadets, vandalising equipment and ripping up plants … Officials want the monkeys tranquillised, sterilised and released back into the wild … But the tender has angered forestry officials who say the academy’s jungle location gives monkeys the right to roam. [Ananova]
They still give rifles to Indian army cadets, right? This problem could easily solve itself with a little, ahem, target practice. If they get any static from forestry officials, the cadets can just claim the monkeys were found to be enemy combatants fighting for Pakistan. Then instead of getting a rebuke, they’ll be honored with a ticker tape parade. And there you have another problem solved for the better with firearms. When will monkeys learn?
Jersey Guy’s lose advertisers
DNSI links to an article that says that the Jersey Guys’ advertisers are starting to pull out:
The Star-Ledger (NJ) is reporting that Cingular Wireless and Hyundai Motor America have pulled advertising from WKXW-FM. The station has been embroiled in controversy almost immediately after hosts of the station’s “The Jersey Guys” program, Craig Carton and Ray Rossi, offered racist and offensive commentary aimed at Asians and Indians.
Blogger Lester Gesteland is also keeping up with the minute by minute. Continue reading
The further on the edge, The hotter the intensity
Quick, who caught my song reference in the title? Niraj forwards us this article from the BBC about Pakistan’s recruitment of female fighter pilots. So hot.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) academy has been all-male for more than 55 years – but now it is going through major change.
Women are now allowed to enrol on its aerospace engineering and fighter pilot programmes and are doing rather well.
To the great surprise of many men, some of the female recruits will soon start flying jet-engine planes.
Male cadets are having to come to terms with the fact that masculinity itself is no longer a condition for reaching this prestigious institute.
But can women withstand the forces that maneuvering a fighter plane puts on one’s body, and perform as well as men? Of course. We KNOW they can from years of experience but it is insightful to point to the data.
Extended periods of hard labour and limited caloric intake are common military conditions. Maximum normal acceleration forces during combat have increased from peak averages of 5 g to 9 g. Besides physical strength, air combat manoeuvring requires significant g-tolerance. G tolerances of 102 women and 139 men were subjected to a Standard Medical Evaluation and the G Profiles were compared. Unpaired t-tests revealed that there was no significant difference between the women and men in either relaxed or straining G tolerance. Covariance analysis controlling for differences in tolerance due to age, height, weight, and activity status revealed that the women have marginally lower tolerance; the analysis also identified height as a factor having a strong negative influence on G tolerance, and weight as having a positive influence. When the women were matched only by height to the men in the comparison group, the women’s mean G tolerances were significantly lower than the men’s. On Standard Training G Profiles, 88% of 24 women and 80% of 213 men completed the runs, but this difference was not significant. G tolerances of 47 women were measured on the Medeval Profiles both during and between menses, but no significant differences related to menstruation were found
Basically this means that the best fighter pilots are short and stocky with a lot of muscle, because this body type tends not to pass out as easily when the blood get sucked from the brain. You want to minimize the distance between the heart and the brain. Without the benefit of a G-suit I’ve even become light headed even at 2.5-3 Gs. Continue reading
Karhod women’s standards are way too high
We’ve all been there before. Maybe she turned you down because you weren’t wealthy. Perhaps your career wasn’t prestigious enough. Or it could have been something entirely materialistic, like the fact that you drive a red 1980 Datsun 210, which is a fine automobile, dammit. Be grateful, because it could be worse — she could have turned you down because of a lack of water:
An acute water shortage in central India has made it tough for men of one village to find wives, because families are reluctant to condemn their daughters to a life of hardship … “In rural India, it is the duty of women to fetch water. When people come to know that their daughter will have to trudge several miles to fetch a couple of pots of water after marriage, which parent will agree?” the (Economic Times) quoted one sociologist as saying. [Reuters/Yahoo!]
Creep
A new biography argues that the British commander who ordered the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on Vaisakhi day, 1919, was every bit as sadistic as reputed. Nigel Colletts’ damning take on General Reginald Dyer is rightly called The Butcher of Amritsar (via Amardeep Singh):
… Indians… were also incensed by the General’s notorious “crawling order.” In the street where a female missionary had been left for dead, Dyer decreed that between 6am and 8pm Indians could only proceed on their bellies and elbows and were to be beaten if they raised a buttock… a series of outrages… ensured that the indigenous elite would seek fulfilment in a government of their own race… [the book] helps retire the notion that the end of the Raj was anything but a good thing.
Surprisingly, Dyer’s instruments of butchery were desi soldiers from remote areas, not Brits. (The U.S. has pursued a similar strategy by using Kurdish soldiers in Sunni areas in Iraq). You’ve got to wonder what the hell Dyer’s soldiers were thinking as they methodically murdered their countrymen with manual rifles:
He chose from the troops at his disposal those he thought would harbour the least compunctions in shooting unarmed Punjabi civilians: the Nepalese Gurkhas and the Baluch from the fringes of far-off Sind… His “horrible, bloody duty”, as he called it, consisted of ordering his soldiers to open fire without warning on a peaceful crowd in an enclosed public square. The General directed proceedings from the front, pointing out targets his troops had missed, and they kept shooting until they had only enough ammunition left to defend themselves on their way back to base. While Dyer made his escape, a curfew ensured that the wounded were left to linger until the following morning without treatment… nearly 400 had been killed, including 41 children and a six-week-old baby, and around 1,000 injured.
