Towelguy

Dear Bollywood,
???

Eagerly awaiting your reply,
Sincerely,
gawker.


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Garden Update

My deck gave birth to a litter of cilantro plants yesterday. I must tell you, cilantro babies don't look like cilantro adults at all. When they come into this world, they are all like two tiny leaves and one tiny stem and they are barely green and so helpless, they don't even wave when you blow wind in their face. But when you pluck off those tiny leaves and taste them, you can feel the cilantro spirit not yet surging, but definitely germinating inside them.

They took a long time waking up. I first planted them in an old pot, a pot full of dirt left over from the previous owner. I called up my mother and told her, "Hello mother, prepare, for once, to be proud of your son for he is now helping the world meet its food-production needs."

My mother said, "what are you food-producing?"

I said, "Cilantro, mother, cilantro." I come from a family of cilantro fanboys. "Are you excited for me?"

My mother replied, "Yes, yes, I am excited. Did you break the seeds before planting them?"

I allowed a stunned silence to elapse for about a minute and a half.

"Break the seeds? Why?"

"Well, you have to kind of break coriander seeds before you plant them in the dirt."

"Okay mother, I will talk to you later." I had not broken the seeds.

I went and prepared an additional pot for cilantro-planting. Again, an old existing pot. This time I broke the seeds. Alright, that should appease the fussy Cilantro Deity.

But it didn't. I waited and waited some more. It didn't help that the weather suddenly turned cold. A week went by. Not a lot happened. I did improve my COD4 rank from 41 to 51 but that's another story which I could narrate again if you were to so desire.

I decided that it was the old dirt that was the root of the infertility. So I went and bought a fresh bag of dirt from the grocery. My suspicions were confirmed. The dirt manual told me that dirt only lasts for three months or so. Dirt comes with a manual. Long live Western Society. So I went and prepared a third pot for cilantro plantation with all the new dirt I had just purchased. I broke the seeds, used new dirt and watered the pot. Conditions couldn't get any more perfect than this. And then I waited.

And waited some more.

And finally, just as I was about to give up my agricultural dreams, two of my pots went into labor. It happened while I was at work so I couldn't share in the joyous moment but when I came home in the evening, I saw the cilantro babies and it was one of my proudest moments since the time I achieved rank 52 in COD4, but that's a different story.

The funny thing is, the two pots that first gave birth were full of old dirt, including the one with the unbroken seeds. I appear to be breaking new ground in cilantro cultivation technology.

Secondly, I have also planted tomatoes. No progress there. Tomatoes fussier than cilantro. Also, experience has now taught me that a farmer needs to be patient with his crop.

The other day, an Indian kid, claiming to be one of my neighbors, came by and offered to mow my lawn. "Really, does it need mowing," I asked him. I could barely see him through the grass so I asked him to shoot a flare so I could find him.

He answered yes, that in his professional opinion, my grass did indeed require mowing. I haven't been able to start my mower yet. I think it needs gas and I am waiting for the war to end for gas to become affordable again. So I said wokay, son, please do the needful. As I was watching him work on my lawn, he noticed that I was looking at my plants with pride and said to me," You know those are all weeds, don't you?", and he pointed towards basically everything in my garden.

The news stunned me. For a number of days, I had been watering those plants with love and water. I felt betrayed, like a prison guard who's discovered that the convict he took under his wing was actually stealing money from him. I was unconvinced.

"Are you sure? Is this a weed?", I asked, pointing to a small pretty yellow flower, a lot of which were scattered throughout my lawn.

"Yes", said the kid.

"What about this one", I said, indicating the tall thing with the crown of white things that disintegrate and blow away when you blow on it.

"Yes, that one is the worst", replied Dr. Greenthumb.

"Okay", I said with resignation. I had weeds.

The kid offered to rip them up for me but I declined the offer. They were my weeds. I had raised them and I would put them to sleep. So I bent down, began to uproot those ungrateful suckers and arranged them in a big pile.

"That is not a weed. It's actually a tulip", said the kid who was still hanging around like some kind of tomato fungus. I handed him the tulip root I had just pulled out of the ground and told him, "Okay, YOU do the weeds. I will be inside playing COD4."

I am ranked 53 now, but that is another story.

General

On the PS3 manual as well as on the manual of its six-axis controller, there is a warning which basically cautions you that while you are playing, if your hands begin to hurt, eyes begin to itch and turn red, if you feel dizzy, start vomiting, have blurry vision, begin to think that Mariah Carey's music doesn't suck or experience similar bizarre symptoms, to immediately place the controller down or, if your hands have formed a claw-like grip around it, to immediately summon a loved one or an emergency first responder of your choice and request them to pry it out with a plier or a similar tool.

And stop playing the PS3 till such a time as these symptoms disappear.

When I read this particular instruction, my first reaction was, "Really? Do people actually get so addicted to video games that it actually turns into a health issue?"

I had this amused reaction well before this weekend when heavy uncontrolled PS3 gaming was something that happened to other people and thus, was something to be ridiculed. And then, this weekend, Call of Duty 4 released 4 new maps and declared that all weekend long, players would earn double the experience while playing online.

About this experience business. Each time you play COD4 online, you gain XP or experience points that allow you to rise in rank. You start as a private, moving on to sergeant, captain, lieutenant, general and finally, at rank 55, you become a commander. As your rank increases, you get better weapons, upgrades for your existing weapons, camouflages, etc. XP is the currency of online COD4 play.

On friday night, I downloaded the new maps and that was the beginning of my dark XP-addled journey to hell. Honestly, I cannot remember what I did all weekend that did not involve holding a PS3 controller or a beer can. I do remember that I started out with rank 41 and by the time the weekend was over, I was 51. I was a 4 star General. Although I didn't vomit or have blurry vision and despite my continuing hatred of all things Mariah Carey, my eyes did blossom forth into a variety of multicolored hues. It is only today morning that they went back to being boring white.

But fuck your eyes, get a PS3 anyways.

One Month later

Having owned the PS3 for a month, I have discovered the following.

I appear to be what is known as a PS3fanboy. Although this term is derogatory in nature when applied by members of the general public towards PS3fanboys, when applied by PS3fanboys towards each other, it is a symbol of the brotherhood created through a common goal of defending our 400 dollar investments into PS3 consoles against the enemy of wallet regret.

The code of the PS3fanboys declares, in no uncertain terms that it behooves me to prowl the interwebtubenets and the various forums contained within in search of postings by rival XBox360fanboys and, in the event of encountering a single word against the PS3, spoken, breathed or thought even, return the favor by hurling a generous amount of choice invective against the XBox 360. Various talking points and items of polemic have been made available for my use such as the fact that the XBox cannot and will not ever have the requisite firepower necessary for the really great forthcoming next-generation state-of-the-art games to call it a home, that the XBox 360 is already so far behind the times that the XBox 720 is rumored to be in the works, that the PS3 has won the HD format war nya nya nya nya nya nya and that 2008 is the year for the PS3 to finally break through due to the release of some huge-ass games that will be exclusively available on the PS3. And my personal favorite : XBoxes have a 16% failure rate whereas the PS3 has a 1% failure rate. So there.

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that playing Call of Duty 4 online is more addictive than crack cocaine. And if that is not the case, then goddamn, I've got to try this crack cocaine shit.

n00b tube : Apparently, this is a grenade launcher attachment for a gun used by online n00bs playing Call of Duty 4 for firing grenades at opponents. It is called a n00b tube because it allows a player to inflict maximum amount of damage while exposing his ass to a minimum amount of danger, thus making it compatible with n00b philosophy. The code of the PS3fanboys and also the XBox360fanboys states that using a n00b tube should be frowned upon, discouraged and vilified. It is perhaps the one single thing that unites these two warring nerd factions. I am glad to report that I have coasted through my n00b stage without so much as giving a passing glance to a n00b tube. For this, I deserve special credit which I will now give myself and accept it on my own behalf.

And that is what I've learnt in my one month of PS3 ownership.

Medical announcement of the day

It's probably a bit late to call it breaking news, but here it is. This goes out to all men. Offered without comment.

Woo-freaking-hoo. I mean, achoo. I have a bad cold.

Okay, no comment, starting NOW.

By the way, the article is from 2003, so I don't know if there's been any new research that contradicts the findings in that one. I am guessing not. Research doesn't carry itself out and I am sure the team did not have a lot of time in the period between 2003 and 2008 to do it.

Perkiomen Railroad

This one's for me so feel free to look away and count blue cars, photograph coconut trees, eat sunflower seeds or whatever it is you do when someone asks you to look away.

I found this amazing website on the Perkiomen branch of the Reading Railroad. This is the long abandoned railroad line on which the current Perkiomen Trail (one of my favorite biking trails) was built upon. This guy, who calls himself a ferro-equinologist (a railroad archaeologist), appears to have traveled over and retraced the entire route of the original railroad line which is no longer there, houses, weeds, the trail and the 21st century having crept up over it. He even created a mapelogue of it, just like I partially did. This ferro-equinologying stuff, by the way, is something that I've often dreamt of doing, and probably will do sometime in the near future.

He's also discovered and photographed various hard-to-notice artifacts of the original railway line that are still standing on or near the trail, such as old rails, rusty signs, signals, old stations, coal feeder trestles, etc. What's funny is that I have often passed and spotted many of these structures on the trail and always wondered about them.

Here's something else he's done on the website. He has some old pictures of the railroad line and based on those, he tries to figure out the locations of the train stations (long gone) in the current landscape. For example, here's a portion of the trail I was biking this saturday. It's in a village called Salford. He has this old black and white picture of the station in the village and a new current picture of the location, and matching the buildings in the background, he figured out where the station building used to stand. This is all very interesting stuff for me, a huge fan and a frequent user of this trail and also a certified railroad lunatic.

Probably not that interesting for you, though. Look at you, all wrapped up in your sunflower seeds and coconut trees.

Farming

Winter is gone and it is time for farmers like me to start planning for the growing season. As you might remember I have a brand new deck to do my farming on and the previous owners of my townhouse kindly left their flower pots scattered all over the place in various states of neglect. I'm not a farmer, I lied. This will be my first foray into agriculture.

This year I am planning to grow my own food. Towards that end, I took the first steps yesterday. It was a warm day and when I had to turn on the AC in my car for the first time in seven months, I realized that it was spring and time to begin planting. So I went home, took a fork from the drawer, moved the dirt around in one of the flowerpots and filled it up with coriander seeds. I also watered it. Soon, I hope the seeds will wake up with a boner, have sex with their neighboring seed and give birth to seedlings which, in turn, will grow up to be at least 99 cents worth of cilantro.

I am starting out with cilantro because I have a lot of cilantro experience. Back in India, I used to grow cilantro in our garden and I had a lot of success. Lesser success was achieved with plants like lady finger (okra) and beans. I remember harvesting one okra pod and one green bean at a time and giving it to my mother to cook for dinner, basking in the warm glow that comes to men who've managed to put food on the table for their family.

So I am starting out with cilantro and I hope to move up to mint, maybe a green chilli here and there. In a mad fit of optimism, I purchased a packet of tomato seeds two years ago and it still lies unopened. Perhaps this will be its year of emancipation. And with a little bit of help from the grocery in the form of onions, hopefully this year my family will be well supplied with salsa.

The Skippack Trail

Biking began last weekend. This is an annotated mapelogue™ of my bike ride with zambezi on the Skippack-Perkiomen Trail.


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