What to do when you have a craving for Chinese food at 3 am

The other day I was talking to a friend on msn, and weirdly enough, we were discussing friendship, and I said: “...that's the whole point of a friend: they stand by your side, they support/defend you...”

Then I watched Lage Raho Munnabhai (Keep at it, Munnabhai) and I realized that I was just so wrong. Friendship is about more than just caring and support; true friendship means kidnapping a Chinese cook from a hotel when your friend has a hankering for Chinese food.

See, Munna (Sanjay Dutt), a local goon, is apologizing to his best friend/ lieutenant, Circuit (Arshad Warsi), for hitting him: “I have to apologize to you. I haven’t slept half the night; all these old memories were whirling in my head. Remember when I was shot in the belly? I couldn’t sleep, and I told you I missed mother? You put my head on your lap and sang me lullabies. And then I raised my hand to you? ... Remember that time I told you I wanted to eat Chinese food at 3 am? You went and kidnapped the Chinese cook from that 5 star hotel. (pause) What delicious Hakka noodles those were, no?”

None of my friends have ever offered to kidnap a chinese cook when I want Chinese. Nooo, they insist on going to a restaurant and paying for the food.

*sulk*

Jokes aside, Lage Raho Munnabhai is one of the funniest and most heartfelt movies to come out of Bollywood in the past few years. Rang de Basanti had the message, but not the humour, and Sanjay Dutt’s befuddled Munna is eminently more relatable than Aamir Khan’s angry DJ. It has the same basic message as Anupam Kher’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara – ie, that it is more important to keep Gandhian values in our hearts than to erect statues and memorials – but unlike the latter movie, LRM is neither a lecture nor a guilt-trip. MGKNM, while wonderfully acted, had an undeniably moral-science-lesson feel to it. LRM, on the other hand, has characters whose very fallibility endears them to us. When Munna is slapped once, he turns the other cheek, because Bapu said so. But when the other cheek is slapped, he dishooms the slapper, because, after all, Gandhiji never said what to do when both cheeks were slapped, right? As Munna might have put it: apun tere ko bolta hai ki ye ekdum mast picture hai.

Plus LRM has this guy in a cameo role. There was much screaming chez Sharon when he showed up. (Screencaps by Maja, who will henceforth be referred to as the BEST. SCREENCAPPER. EVER.)

PS - If you do watch it, or have already watched it, and Hindi is not a language with which you’re that familiar, I’m wondering whether the subtitles do a good job of differentiating between Munna and Circuit’s tapori-speak and every one else’s standard Bombay Hindi. I’m just curious if they caught that distinction, because a lot of the funny came from that.

The politician's guide to idiocy

Gay Perry: Look up idiot in the dictionary. You know what you'll find?
Harry Lockhart: A picture of me?
Gay Perry: No! The definition of idiot. Which you fucking are!

Quote from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), courtesy of IMDb

Toronto lawyer Stephen Ledrew, who served as president of the federal Liberal Party of Canada from 1998 to 2003, was the last high-profile candidate to announce his decision to run for mayor. Ledrew is an idiot.

No, seriously.

Not only does the man owe Revenue Canada $364,140 in unpaid taxes, he’s actually proud of it. You see, Mr Ledrew, fine upstanding citizen that he is, says that he needed to put his children through private school rather than pay his taxes. In his own words, as quoted in the Toronto Star: “I owe taxes. The taxpayer can wait. My children can not. I was proud of my choices, my priorities. I'd do it again. Any father knows his children are the most important thing." (emphasis mine)

As John Barber in the Globe and Mail put it: “Has any would-be politician ever said anything stupider than that?” Public schools close because of lack of funding, a lack caused in part by twits like LeDrew, who don’t pay taxes and don’t care about the public system because their darling little angels attend exclusive private schools. Not only is he an unrepentant criminal, he’s publicly indicated his recidivistic intent – and now the man has the gall to run for public office?

*head explodes*

Like I said, LeDrew is an idiot. Don’t encourage him. On November 13^th, don’t vote LeDrew.

Not Getting Sexyback

The first time I heard this track, I had no clue who was singing. There’s something familiar, I thought, but damned if I know what that is. Halfway through the second time I heard it, something clicked. That… that’s not Justin Timberlake, is it? Since when has he sounded like a girl?

I like the song. It gets under your skin, drags you out of your chair and has you shimmying and dancing on the spot. Here’s the question, though: why is it that Paris Hilton’s first album is universally condemned as being over-produced, when her braying gets modulated down to singing – while here, Timberlake’s admittedly higher register gets bumped into a whole different sex, and no one says anything?

Ben Rayner on Paris Hilton in the Toronto Star, Aug 27th 2006: "Of course Paris sounds decent. The girl has more money than all of our gods combined and about equal "pull," at least in those rarefied celebrity circles where "pull" is considered next to godliness.

If the first 15 runs at the thing had turned out something that gave listeners brain aneurysms and wiped out migratory bird flocks, the cash would have kept flowing until the evil was sufficiently contained for mass distribution at Wal-Mart. The music industry needs customers; it's not gonna kill them outright."

Timberlake, on the other hand, made the cover of Rolling Stone in September.

Huh? I'm so confused.

PS - The fact that I’m - in a sense - defending Paris Hilton actually makes me dislike the song more than I would've under normal circumstances.

From halfway down that slippery slope

I think I might be developing an addiction to classical music.

Stop laughing! It’s not funny, damnit! Okay, fine – maybe just a little.

Let me be more specific – I think I’m growing just a bit too fond of live classical music. See, the TSO has this program called TSoundCheck through which those classical fans between the ages of 18 and 29 can get cheap tickets to certain TSO programs. I don’t think it’s too often that a venerable institution like the TSO shares a selling strategy with your average drug dealer – but it’s the same principle, pretty much: first given them a taste for cheap ($12 a pop!), then – once they’re hooked – jack up the prices (anywhere from $35-$140!) and they’ll pay through the nose to get their nose ear candy.

And what can I say? I’ve always wanted to pretend to be an aesthete.

Thursday, they did Beethoven’s 2^nd and 6^th symphony, along with Mahler’s Rückert Lieder; and oh, how I loved it. It’s especially odd, as I have something of a tin ear for classical music: especially on CD, it all starts to meld into an aural blob of crazed violin bowing to me. Live, though, it comes alive, with people playing in unison, in opposition to synthesize sounds that you can almost feel on your skin. I had no idea music could actually be tactile before; the first time, I couldn’t stop smiling goofily because I had no idea music could feel like that.

I console myself with the thought that there are worse things to be addicted to.

It helps too that the performances aren’t note-perfect. On Thursday, Marie-Nicole Lemieux’s vocals on the Lieder were overshadowed by a too-exuberant orchestra, and perhaps the less sophisticated among us would be better able to appreciate Ruckert’s poetry if the text and a translation were provided with the programme, as was done for the Mozart@250 festival. Nevertheless, if you’re in the GTA area, and you’re between 18 and 29, TSoundCheck is very well worth a try.

Great. Now I’m a pusher.

Vent(i) for me, thanks

Edmund Blackadder:  This is turning into a really rotten evening.

Amy Hardwood:  Yes, well you better make the most of it, because it's your
last.And it's a pity, because it's usually against my principles to shoot dumb
animals.

Blackadder: Except squirrels?

Amy:  Yes! Bastards! I hate them with their long tails and their stupid 
twitchy noses. 

From Blackadder the Third, episode 5, “Amy and Amiability”

(Personally, I find squirrels adorable, but there's no accounting for tastes. )

We all – yes, even you in the back with the fedora and handlebar moustache – have things we can't stand. Things that annoy us, enrage us, – and why? Childhood accidents? Deeply-seated neuroses? Does it matter? I have a whole list.

I can't stand mushrooms. Oh, no, mushrooms in food are lovely – and the sight of mushrooms in grocery stores does not raise my blood pressure. However, when I see mushrooms growing in situ in my backyard, that I cannot bear. Consider if you will, a green lawn, with roses on the side; and then consider the lawn with little mushroom pop-pop-popping all over it. It's like acne, and what has my poor backyard done to deserve acne? It doesn't subsist on a diet of junk food, it gets enough water, and then it gets attacked by these... fungi? The first time it happened, I seethed, I simmered, I fumed – and then I went out and kicked the mushrooms all over the place. Of course, that made it worse, but I did feel a whole lot better (for a while.)

I'm picky about spelling. Not in general – I've corrected essays filled with typos, and felt nothing more than a mild sense of pity for the poor benighted soul who thought Austen was spelt Osten – but there are a few words I cannot bear to see misspelt. For example, when people misspell the English proper name Michael as Micheal, I see red. I mean, c'mon, “Micheal?” It LOOKS wrong, for crying out loud! As an aside – I'm a visual speller. My spelling depends on the word looking right to me. I usually have to write out words like caribbean out a few times before I get it right – carribbean? carribean? caribean? - which means I'd probably suck at things like spelling bees, which depend on having to sound out words. Anyway, “Micheal” just looks wrong, to me. I'd be really interested to know if anyone else gets this, or even spells visually. Let me also just point out that the Irish and Scottish variants of Michael are Mícheál and Mìcheal respectively, according to wwww.behindthename.com, which don't bug me, because, hello, different languages. But when someone mispells an obviously english name, as in, “I used to be a Micheal Jackson fan” - that bugs me. Also annoying is the spelling “Conner” for Connor - though I think this might be simply because C-O-N-N-O-R has a beatiful symmetry that's lost in C-O-N-N-E-R.

The name whose misspelling most annoys me, however, is my own. If we'd kept all the Christmas cards we've received over the years, here are some of the variants you'd see: Sharin, Sharen, Sherin, Sheren, Sheron, Sherrin – I'd go on, but this red haze is beginning to make typing problematic. Spelling errors are understandable when it's a card from an acquaintance of your father's who's maybe heard your name from a mutual friend, and as such is guessing at the spelling. But still, Sharon's a fairly popular name, and you'd figure people would know how it's spelt, right? Wrong. I once had a classmate say, “ You don't pronounce it Sharown, right? More like Sharen? So why not spell it that way?” Because that's the wrong spelling, idiot! If you can learn to pronounce “knight” as 'night' and not 'k-niggit', you can do me the courtesy of pronouncing my name correctly too!

People like Varsha Bhosle, who think that Indianness is the same as Hinduness have my undying contempt. Of course, Hinduism is a huge part of Indian culture – that's undeniable. But why deny the Indianness of religious minorities? Imagine being introduced to someone only to have them say, “Sharon? That's not an Indian name is it?” Well, if you mean to conflate Indianness with Hinduness, then no, it's not Indian. But given that there have been Christians, including my own lot, in India for nearly 2000 years, I don't think the whole “You're not Indian” argument holds much water.

*deep breath* Ah, much better. No more repressing for me – venting is good for the soul.