Chp 210. Burying Manure 2 goals deep!

Sheeessh. Where are all the Manchester United (Manure) fans when you need them the most? lolz!



November 10th 2008. A night all Arsenal and genuine football fans will always remember. The night Arsenal dominated the game against arch rivals Manure without our two best players Adebayor (ankle) and RVP (suspension) who are also currently the top scorer(s) for Arsenal (with 5 goals each in this EPL season), and the others were Emmanuel Eboue (knee), Tomas Rosicky (hamstring) and Eduardo (broken leg).

With the injury roster, everybody assumed it would be a replay of that disastrous day (16th Feb 2008) when Manure trashed 10-man Arse 4-0 at the 5th round FA Cup because there were not enough experienced players in the squad.

The injury list for that black day was:
Philippe Senderos (knee)
Gael Clichy (hamstring)
Emmanuel Adebayor (hamstring)
Johan Djourou (groin)
Robin van Persie (thigh)
Abou Diaby (calf)
Manuel Almunia (sick)
Denilson (hamstring)
Tomas Rosicky (hamstring)
Theo Walcott (thigh)
Alex Song (muscular)
Bacary Sagna (personal reasons)

Rumor had it that Arsene Wenger even started pulling out Arsenal supporters from the stand and made them play for the team

But for the match on Saturday Nov 10 2008, as true Arsenal fans, our faith in the team was as strong as ever, and boy were we rewarded!!!!!! Fantastic play dear Gunners! Yeahhhhh! Even with the usual biasness always shown in favor of Manure, Arse came out the clear victors.

Just a little bit sore though, because Bendtner definitely didn’t play well… Nasri could have gotten his historical hat-trick against Manure on so many occasions, if only Bendtner didn’t play selfishly. But over all, it was amazing, and there was no sign of the trademark Manure-last-minute-pressure at all, even when a ridiculous 6 minutes was awarded as injury time and Manure managed to score one in the 90th minute. No pressure at all. Arsenal kept their cool throughout. Positive signs of maturity indeed.

I love the way Arsenal concluded the official match report:

The whistle blew soon afterwards.

Arsenal were back. But had they ever really gone away?

lolz!

And so I will get back to my opening question. Where are all the Manure fans when you need them the most!!?? So far, none of my friends who support Manure have answered my call Some of them even switched off their mobiles and till today they are still switched off! Hahaha!

Well dear friends, you can switch on your mobiles now. Your folks must be worried. It’s been two days already so the moment to gloat and thrash talk has passed. I promise I will not call you up regarding this…

To celebrate our victory, me and two other Arse fans went for a ride all over town at 2 in the morning in a rickety old auto (actually we rode around Andheri-Juhu-Lokhandwala area only but saying "town" makes it feel more ceremonious and pompous! )

2 in the morning we were screaming out Gunners woooohooooo everywhere and our auto driver too was definitely enjoying it! 2 in the morning we stopped by a roadside chai-wala on Juhu beach and treated everybody present to tea and ciggies! 2 in the morning we spotted a lot of things we shouldn’t see too! But then, let that be a topic for another post.


All in all, it was a memorable night. The auto fare came up to nearly 400 bucks, but it was worth it!

Arsenaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal

Chp 209. A walk down Coimbatore lane

A few minutes ago, my Bangalore ex-roomie and very close friend Amos sent me this news article.

NDTV.com | India's small town space heroes

Behind India's first moon mission are the hundreds of scientists who toiled to make it a success. What stands out is that many of the heroes of Chandrayaan are not from the much hyped IITs but from regional engineering institutions in small towns.

For instance the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore is known for its contribution to science and technology for the last 63 years. PSG College of Technology, again in Coimbatore has been imparting quality education since last 57 years.

PSG Tech is the college I graduated from, and GCET is Amos’ college!

We both felt extremely proud, even though we didn’t contribute anything towards India’s grand success But still, nobody can take our pride away.

Memories of Coimbatore immediately rushed back.

Of cheap transportation and strict college rules. Of college dress code (no round collar tee-shirts for men and no jeans for women) to powerless Student Union body as compared to North India (our SU declared a strike once, and the entire SU body was suspended for a month! No such demonstration took place again after that.)



Of cheap movie tickets (balcony seat at an English theatre was just 30 bucks) to 5-rupees-front-row seat ticket at a shady Shakeela film theatre (where one could even light up a cigarette inside!)

Of amazingggg South Indian delicacies of different variety (trust me, you can’t just call it "South Indian" dish because each region has its own specialty) to cheap road-side "standing bars" (situated behind every wine-shop where one could stand and slowly finish one’s drink. The more advanced standing-bars even have a person frying omlettes with other snacks like kadalai and muruku.)

Of eating one’s lunch on a banana leaf with assorted "curry" to go with the rice like dal, sambar, rasam, more (diluted salted dhai) and podhi + ghee, to joining different "mess" around our college (we shifted from mallu mess to chettinad mess, where the aunties treated us as their own sons and cooked the best lunch ever!)

Of crappy hostel food (the idlis at our Tech hostel was so hard that they were called "Tech bomb" because apparently you could kill somebody if you threw the idlis at them!) and joining North Indian mess (which didn’t last long because all we ever get was chappatis) and finally settling down for our hostel Rwandan mess (ah those exchange students from Rwanda had the best soup! Other Indians were not allowed to join the mess but since there were just 2-3 of us from the North-east they gave us special permission! )

Of strict college rules when it comes to relationships (yeah a guy and a girl talking to each other was prohibited frowned upon!) and cheap mobile phone tariff rates (free talk time from 7pm to 7am, so nearly every hot blooded male would be talking to their classmates staying in the girl’s hostel for hours and hours.)

Of last minute revision before an exam (walking from the hostel to the college campus and reading a particular chapter for the first time!) to finding the opportunity to walk along with a female classmate towards the college (hence ending up talking to her and not reading that chapter you’ve never even read once before).

Of arrears and back-papers and strangely forming a bond with guys of other engineering branches who happened to be present for every arrear exams that you attempted!

Of bumpy night-bus trips from Madurai to Erode to Namakkal to Nagapattinam to Kottayam (K) trying to win all the basketball tournaments that were conducted, to a memorable 1 point victory over Indian Bank (the reigning Indian club Champion back then!)



Of talking about "sight", "matter" and "scene" with my tam classmates, who were the sweetest bunch of people I had ever known, to teasing a classmate just because a girl borrowed his note-book!

Of guys visiting cyber cafes with girlfriends because those were the "hot-spots"...


Of running around in lungi and enjoying the "freedom", to dancing in tam style and having great fun.

Of earning the infamous nickname – "Tam-Zo"

Of having a North Indian girlfriend and the few North Indians in our college threatening to "break my bones" if we didn’t call off our relationship , and of my south Indian friends coming to my aid every time there was a fight...

Of shouting and hurling abuses right in front of each others’ faces during a "fight" but never quite actually hitting each other! (lots of daaaaiiiiii’s and okaaaaaalaaa but never a punch or slap, which is too hilarious for a Mizo onlooker)

Of my dear tam friends teaching me cuss words in tamil, and of them becoming so happy and entertained when I could finally abuse their mothers in their own language (if you really think about it, it is hilarious!)

Of excitedly dressing up and going to a "happening" college party (which usually meant there were 200 guys and 5 girls present) to the extremely nice cops who usually gave us warnings whenever they caught us drunk.

Of jumping into a crowded bus and paying for my friends while proudly telling the bus conductor the amount in tamil, and of the bus conductor always confirming the amount back by using his fingers to denote if I have said the correct amount or not

Of our extremely close-knitted "Peacepipe" Gang (that was the name of our gang. Why we call ourselves peacepipe? – Go figure )

Of watching the latest Tamil blockbuster release with my classmates and genuinely enjoying it!

Of the racial abuses that were almost 100% absent!!!! (I swear!)

Of friendship, simplicity and consummate honesty among friends.

Of the coffee-wallas who were present at every street corner.

Of Tamil hospitality.


Ah… I miss you Coimbatore!!! PSG, you truly roxxxx!!!!!

If you find this post funny or from one of those enginerring colleges in Coimbatore, please feel free to digg this post!

Chp 208. Are you an average man? :)

Of late, many of us are bombarded with the vimax penis enlargement ads!

At first I thought these guys were going on a mega advertising spree but I grew suspicious when I started noticing these ads at sites such as bbc, ebay, technorati, ndtv, mtvindia, nat geo etc! And then whenever I come online from my sister’s laptop or from a Sify Cyber café, I could never see the same ads.

These are some of the ads:





At first I thought it was ip specific, kinda like a new hybrid of viral advertisement where the ad cookies determine whether you can access the ads or not based on your browser history (something like how adsense works where the displayed ads are based on the content of your particular post). I assumed that if you have cyber-nanny installed or your office bans you from visiting certain restricted sites like personal yahoo mail, orkut, myspace etc, then you may not be able to see these ads.

I was wrong.

Today as I was surfing for more details regarding this ad, I came across this interesting discussion thread.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1749920&tstart=0

Allison says:

As I mentioned yesterday this is a browser hijack malware and nothing to do with your OS, server side issues or anything similar.

--------------------------------------------

12th root of 2 says:

The answer is: You have a Trojan Horse called DNSChanger 1.1 or other variation that is causing unauthorized ads to load in place of various websites’ scheduled ads.

The Trojan Horse is most likely in (root) /library/Internet Plug-Ins, but don't bother to try to find it in the finder or with spotlight - It's invisible. A free trial version of MacScan will find it, isolate it, and allow it to be trashed.

Be sure to do a full scan of the entire hard drive –
I found the Trojan in the “main” library – not the user library. If you purchase MacScan, you can perform custom scans of smaller areas of the hard drive.
You don’t need to re-install Safari
You don’t need to disable your JavaScript
You don’t need to disable your Plugins
You don’t need to install blocking programs
Just get rid of the Trojan Horse!

So there you go. This is not an aggressive marketing pitch but rather a stupid malware. Come to think of it, when was the last time we received a proper decent penis enlargement advertisement that was not associated with spam?



I like the way this company directly attacked the "size doesn’t matter" theory:

Vimax.com

Don't buy in to the myth that says women don't care about the penis size. If you are small then it doesn't matter how good of a person you are, because you won't hold on to your loved one for long.

So basically, this company is all out to prove that romance is dead and all women are a Jenna Jameson or a Sylvia Saint or a late Linda Lovelace (err… I googled those names…)

Another point I just love:

You control the growth because once you reach your optimum size you could stop taking VIMAX PILLS. We say you could stop taking VIMAX PILLS because it is not necessary to be larger then 9 inches. Most women can only comfortably accommodate a 9 inch penis. Anything larger than that may be too large for most women. Nine inches or more then 9 inches, the choice is yours.

Haha this is so freaking hilarious! Imagine it is possible to change the size whenever we guys want?

"urrrm… honey, how was your day? Would you like the usual 9 inches for tonight or you prefer the 10 inches?"
"Darling, I had a hard day at office today… I just need to relax. Gimme just 8 inches for tonight if you don’t mind…"
"ok." (concentrates… 8 inches… 8 inches… 8 inches…)
"Ah! Here you go honey. Exactly 8 inches."



Even though the size of one’s manhood is what we guys sometimes joke about, I usually don’t find the same joke coming from the fairer sex. I’m just guessing it is no big deal (pun unintended). Because if this was really that big an issue, how come we do not find that many "famous quotations" by "famous people" regarding this.

Martin Luther King Jr. most definitely did not pep up the crowd with:

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the size of their schlong."

Shakespeare too probably did not lament in angst:

"To resize, or not to resize: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The tiny weeny size of outrageous fortune,"

Back home too, can you imagine what it would be like had that magical song from Qayamat se Qayamat Tak went like this:

"Papa kehte hain, bada laand hoyega…"

mmmm…

(Please do pardon my brazen vulgarity on this particular post. Desperate ads require desperate measures.)

Judging from the advertisement above (Surprise her!), Cornelia the first wife of Julius Caesar would have probably said

“I came, I saw, I wasn’t surprised.”

Our man Julius must have been mighty irritated with all the Roman citizens enlarging their… spearitus. The last straw was when he was taking a leak in the toiletorium and Brutus entered to pee and whipped it out…

Julius exclaimed, “Et tu, Brutus!!???”

----------------------------------


Across many cultures (if not all), the size of one’s manhood is usually used as a factor to determine one’s manliness. The bigger the tool, the macho-er the fool, supposedly. Cellular phones are the only thing we men brag about who got the smallest.

And pornos and sleazy ads and irritating spam mails only seem to add more "truth" to the myth that the only thing women want in this world is a well endowed guy - somebody who can stand like a tri-pod, if y’know what I mean.

Sex & the city Samantha cried when the guy she really liked (finally) happened to have a "small one". And since many women worship her, men all over the world are making genuine attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen to them too. Because to be dumped by a woman purely because his "thing" is a thingie, most men would rather be dead than face that ultimate embarrassment.

Well, whether I cry or not, my first intention right now is to remove this freaking malware from my system. Shooooo. Fly away, you big horrible penis.

Special thanx to colleague Aalaap who twitted:

Everyone - edit your windows Hosts file and put "127.0.0.1 b1.adv.net" and rid yourself of this Vimax assault.

How to edit Host files in Vista

Aalaap also continues to blog about this with solutions for firefox, windows, mac and linux users :

Firefox users: Simply right click any of those ads and select "Block images from b1.adv.net..." and you're done. How I wish everything was this simple!

Non-Firefox users running Windows: You have to edit your Windows "hosts" file and add a fake DNS entry for the host "b1.adv.net"...

Cheers to all you average men out there!

If you find this post funny or are one of those users irritated with this Vimax Ad or even one of those guys who are "average", please feel free to digg this post!

Chp 207. Death seems a better option

...

I dropped my hard disk :-(

...

Chp 206. Age is NOT just a number

Remember decades ago when leather jackets and bell-bottom jeans were considered hep and clicking your fingers was all you had to do to be a great dancer? Ah… those magical years when our version of today’s gangsta hiphop was MC Hammer and how we would end up jumping every time the song "Jump" by Kris Kross was played? Remember how you just couldn’t stop listening to NKOTB’s "Step by step" and "Happy birthday"?

Now it is no longer considered cool to moonwalk or have a poster of Smokie or Madonna covering your wall (I’m not talking about this Jewish Kabbalah Madonna, I’m referring to the Like-a-virgin Material girl). But no matter how time flies by, certain things always remain. Like that song "Happy Birthday" by NKOTB –

Happy Birthday to you
You´re still young
Age is just a number
Don´t you stop having fun
…



Ah, doesn’t that song just makes you wish it’s true? Age is just a number? Reality is soooooo different from the things that we try to believe in.

I’m a guy, and I definitely do feel the sharp fangs of age digging deep inside of me every passing day. Every morning I spend more and more time in front of the bathroom mirror because the "surface" I’m washing is gradually increasing daily. Places where I used to apply shampoo a couple of years ago, I now apply face-wash

Growing bald is not my intention, believe me

And this is why I envy women so much. First of all, this baldness gene is from the XX-chromosomes, meaning it is because of my mom that I am bald. Likewise dad can blame grandma.

Secondly, signs of ageing for women show mainly on their facial features, which can easily be altered with the help of "advanced technology" like liposuction and botox, or even painless procedures like cosmetics.

A couple of days ago, I came across this site by OLAY which was extremely impressive.

There’s a neat viral there if you click on the "Click here to make your skin look younger in minutes" link.

OLAY, unlike brands like Fair & Lovely, position their brand on Anti-ageing, whereas Fair & Lovely seems to convey the message that "being fair is beautiful and dark is ugly". I am in the Advertising field, and if there’s one thing I hate more than corny stupid and careless Ads, then it is an Ad that seems to strengthen stereotypes and exploit discrimination. I once saw an NDTV interview where Prahlad Kakkar said he would never do a Fair & Lovely commercial because it goes against his ethics. RESPECT!

So here’s the really cool thing about this OLAY viral. Kudos to the Agency that executed this masterpiece (Hope it’s not one of our competitors here in Mumbai!!!)



Upload your own pic or use the existing ones, or if you have a webcam you can even take your picture directly for this app.



Once your pic is up there, you will receive information on the signs of ageing etc. If it was not for the metrosexuality hype, I would have never uploaded my pic in the first place



Start olay-fying your face!



With the built-in app, you can actually remove some of the wrinkles and lines etc. People familiar with photoshop might sigh "No big deal" but it’s quite a different thing to execute this online.

Caution though! Don’t over do it.

I wanted to see how young I could get and repeated the procedure a hundred times.

This is what I got.

…..
…..
…..
…..





I even registered for the free trial version!!! lolzzzz

How much more shameless can I get!!!! Hehehehe.

Comon, I’m an Indian. Anything I see labeled as "FREE" should be grabbed immediately Here’s the link: Free OLAY 8gms sample pack!

The best part is, for Mumbai and B’lore residents you have the MCOUPON option. I registered my mobile number and I received a code and instructions on how to redeem the sample pack immediately.

Let’s see now if I can really redeem that free pack… Or maybe they’ll reject my code saying I am beyond repair!

Whatever be it, it’s great to see good virals once in a while (The last time I saw a really good viral was the one on Gillette Mach 3. Dunno who did that but I really loved it!!!). And since this is my field of profession now, I have to keep an eye out for these things, and hey it’s good to have stumbled upon it so that I could tell my dear visitors about the site.

So knock yourself out, dear ladies and gentlewomen. Go register!

(sheeeeesh, the last line sounds like I am actually advertising the product! Damn, being a copywriter, it’s so hard to turn it off sometimes! I was with my girl the other night and I actually said "Honey, exclusive offer for you tonight! Avail of a fantastic surprise gift package by simply clicking here! Hurry before this multiple offer ends!"



hehe just joking. Who am I kidding? I’m a copywriter = I can't find a girlfriend.

Still, it was fun. Cheap thrills indeed!)