‘The Kumars’ to debut on BBC America

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p>Wonderful news: The Kumars at No. 42, a successor to the incredible British Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, debuts on BBC America next Sunday. Like The Ali G Show, it’s a celebrity interview format where the interviewers are in character. You’re inviting Patrick Stewart in to meet your embarrassingly ethnic family, wicked old nani included, and filming the results.

“I said, ‘Mum, this is Helena Bonham Carter.’ Mum said, ‘You’re such a pretty girl. It’s a shame they forced you to wear a monkey mask in your last film.’ “

The desi grandma character is particularly pointed, which puts me in mind of Zohra Sehgal’s ninja-dowager roles in Masala and Bhaji on the Beach.

“The expectation and cliche of an old Indian woman is that she’s the most invisible woman in the world, walking 10 paces behind her husband,” Syal says. “The old ones I met, particularly the widows, were raucous and cheeky. Widowhood was the first time no one relied on them — that’s why they turned out to be so naughty.”

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Camping out

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The troubled relationship between desis and camp:

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Given the number of desi engineers, you’d think the Trekkie quotient would be through the roof, but desis have never been strong with knowing campiness. Irony is the forte of post-materialist, post-sexual revolution societies… Unintentionally camp, now, that’s different: guys with bad haircuts and thick plastic civil service specs; aging, tubby icons romancing young lovelies; Indian Superman. The legion of desi camp could overrun a big tent party and still leave badly-shirted henchmen mewling at the gates.

More here.

Pimping off-broadway theater, sight unseen

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Browntown is a satirical comedy that explores the issue of cultural stereotyping from the point of view of three brown-skinned actors at an audition for a less-than-original TV-movie, The Color of Terror. The actors, who are competing with one another to play the role of an Arab terrorist, grapple with their misgivings about the script. With only the help of casting directorÂ’s ridiculous advice, all three actors do their best to embody all the qualities of a truly vicious terrorist.

5 shows only, from Tuesday 8/24 to Saturday 8/28. For more information on tickets, etc, go to the show website. This is part of the Fringe NYC festival, “the largest multi-arts festival in North America, with more than 200 companies from all over the world performing for 16 days in more than 20 venues”. Let me know how it was if you happen to catch it …

my WHAT is cute??

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eight london hospitals are outsourcing transcription to india, with comical, yet potentially worrisome results:

London, Aug. 19: Yet another fault has been found by British unions with the quality of outsourcing to India but this time perhaps with some justification.
Medical letters are being transcribed by secretaries in India but potentially life-threatening errors are creeping in because of insufficient knowledge of either the English language or of complicated terms, it was claimed yesterday.
It is also possible that the use of computer spell checkers is leading to some words being replaced by unlikely ones. In one example, the drug “Lansoprazole”, used to treat stomach ulcers, was transcribed as the popular holiday resort “Lanzarote”.
In another case, “phlebitis (vein inflammation) left leg” was changed to “flea bite his left leg”. And a “below knee amputation” was transcribed as “baloney amputation”. One note referred to a patient’s “cute angina” instead of “acute angina”. “Euston station tube malfunction” should have read “Eustachian tube malfunction”.

personally? i think most politicians should have their “baloney” amputated, but that’s just me. 😀

from The Telegraph.

The ugly Microsoftian

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p dir=”ltr”>There was a brouhaha over Kashmir in Windows 95:

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. “It cost millions… Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world…”

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Abuse of material witness statutes

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Because I have a friend that works for Human Rights Watch, I have for months been following along as she examines the abuses of the federal material witness statute. What is the material witness statute? Here is a brief explanation from a Christian Science Monitor article about alleged “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla:

…rather than obtaining an arrest warrant by demonstrating to a judge that federal authorities had probable cause to believe Padilla was planning mass murder, they instead relied on an obscure federal law designed to guarantee the presence of a key witness at a criminal proceeding.

By labeling Padilla a “material witness” in an ongoing grand jury investigation of terrorism, US officials were able to whisk him off the streets and into a high-security prison cell with minimal law-enforcement effort.

Since the terror attacks on Sept. 11, the so-called material-witness statute has emerged as a key-and highly controversial-weapon in the legal arsenal being used to wage the Bush administration’s war against terrorism in America’s homeland.

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The Beeb on “Sikhs and the City”

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The BBC is doing a show on Sikhs in the UK. Their press release starts with this little factoid: “There are enough Sikhs in Britain to fill the Royal Albert Hall one hundred times over.” I’ve never thought of counting groups’ population sizes that way before ….

The documentary is narrated by Kulvinder Ghir from “Goodness Gracious Me.” It will include interviews with Comedian Sody Singh Kahlon, nonagenarian marathon record holder Fauja Singh, and twin artists Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, amongst others. (This is a painting by the twins, btw.)

Now we know how many Albert Halls it takes to sit Brit Sikhs … Nah. Tell Paul he doesn’t have to worry about his day job yet.

it’s not just the brown they’re keeping down…UPDATED!

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well if they’re going to deny a KENNEDY, no wonder i always get harassed; apparently, even being political royalty doesn’t spare you from the idiocy of the TSA’s futile attempts to protect us from…uh…senior Senators from the North-East.

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, (D-MA) was stopped at right coast airports five times in march because his name appeared on a no-fly list. though his staff called to have the problem corrected, the Senator continued to be stopped until Homeland Security wreck-retary Tom Ridge intervened and apologized.

the washington post has more, and you should read it, please:

Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed.
…Kennedy’s description yesterday of his air-travel troubles — mentioned during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the 9/11 commission’s recommendations — renewed questions about the quality and effectiveness of the no-fly list. The list was established by security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Critics said the senator’s experience served as the latest example of how a system designed to improve security is instead targeting innocent travelers.
The government does not make public the names or the total number of people on the list, which officials say is constantly updated. According to FBI documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act request, more than 350 Americans have been delayed or denied boarding since the list’s inception. The list has not led to any arrests, officials said.

350 americans delayed, zero arrests. oh yeah, THAT’S telesis. Continue reading →