Silence at the dinner table is highly underrated.

Now Playing: Agnes Obel - Riverside

"Oh, she eats with her left hand?"

I'm used to getting that question from Indian aunties and uncles, usually in a disapproving voice, so when someone asked my mother that over dinner, I said, "yes, she does" in a tone of voice that most reasonable people might take as a sign to retreat.

"You know how you can fix that?"

"Uncle, I don't want to fix it!"

Mum intervened, "We never felt it was necessary to force her to use her right hand. What's the point, really?"

Uncle still didn't take the hint. "But you know, if you wanted to change, how to do it?"

I looked at Mum. Clearly Uncle was going to have his say, regardless of our feelings. "How?"

"You take a knife - oh don't worry, a very small one will do - and you cut the... what are they called, ligaments? tendons? Well whatever it is, you cut the ones on your left hand, and you'll wind up having to use your right hand by default! Ha!"

We stared.

Thankfully, there was no knife in the vicinity - very small or otherwise - or somebody would've gotten hurt real bad.

Why? How? (But Mostly Why.)

 Why is Heidi Montag following me on twitter?

That Gaping Maw

Now Playing: Little Boots - Symmetry

From the Rush Limbaugh show, Jan 13th:

 "Yes, I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen -- in the words of Rahm Emanuel -- we have another crisis simply too good to waste.  This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate.  They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country.  It's made-to-order for them.  That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.

[...]

CALLER:  Mega Rush Baby dittos.  My question is, why did Obama in the sound bite you played earlier, when he's talking about if you wanted to donate some money, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov --

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER: -- to direct you how to do so.  If I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the WhiteHouse.gov page and --

RUSH:  Exactly.  Would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?

CALLER:  No.

RUSH:  Would you trust that your name is going to end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes.

CALLER:  Absolutely.

RUSH:  Absolutely right.

CALLER:  That's the point.

RUSH:  Besides, we've already donated to Haiti.  It's called the US income tax."

 Atleast 30,000 people have died in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and Rush Limbaugh is more concerned with scoring points off Obama - who, of course, is only concerned with this because it is a black issue. 

It was bad enough when he mocked Michael J Fox' Parkinson's symptoms, when he flat-out stated that he wanted Obama's administration to fail - if anyone had said that about Bush, he'd have been first in line crying High Treason - but this is just beyond the pale. When is someone going to stand up to Rush Limbaugh and say, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

This Is How You Remind Me... How Much I Hate You.

- Che... You haven't heard?
- What?
- Maybe you should sit down.
- No, just tell me! Oh God, what is it?
- I didn't want to be the one to tell you -
- WHAT IS IT?
- Nickelback is Billboard's group of the decade.
- Nooo...
- Here, sit down... Can I get you some tea? Coffee?
- Hemlock!!!
- It's not that bad...
- Not that bad?!
- This Is How You Remind Me is only the 4th biggest song of the decade.
- Ohhh.
- Yeah.
- My soul hurts.

Dravida Kazhagam!

Now Playing: La Roux - Quicksand

Major Malayalam Fail: For the longest time, I thought 'nammal thammil' - between us - was actually 'nammal thamizh' - we the Tamils - which I understood to be some expression of pan-Dravidian identity, which I further took to be a very, very macro way of saying 'us.'

Really.

And then I was always so confused why people were using such a large-scale expression for such personal situations.