The Woes of a Mainstream Music Fan

Sri Lanka is quite fun to be in. But as we saw recently, sometimes it can just be plain insane. This is a chronicle of the series of events that transpire when some popular entertainer decides to come down here. Note that no, the guy who did plan to come here is not my favorite artist. Sheesh.

Day 1: “AWESOME! My favorite band is coming down to play here! Never thought this country would ever get  a popular musician to come down”

Day 2: “Tickets are expensive”

Day 3: “Better start collecting”

These few days are pure bliss, where you just keep imagining yourself in front of the stage, yelling till your throat hurts. The only weather your parade experiences being slight rain in the form of hordes of music Nazis going on about how the performer coming over is singlehandedly killing music and how auto-tune gives baby goats cancer. Music of any sort other than their preference will be dismissed as “fake”, like their fans, ha ha. They will then laugh all over themselves.

But your spirit will not be swayed by a bunch of teens in raccoon make-up! You persevere and bide the days till your concert takes place. You know that nothing short of some retarded series of events taking place can stop it from happening.

Day 6: A retarded series of events happens.

Day 7: “Maybe the show’ll still happen. After all, the disturbance is just by a few people who are upset over there being a single frame in which a an alligator’s tooth looks kind of like a religious idol if it were to be held upside down in the sunlight at about 3pm.”

And so the “uproar” starts, allegedly the whole nation is outraged by the blatant disrespect for our culture. Apparently Akon videos are not played to a wider audience than this concert could ever hope to reach. Apparently people sit at home staring at the ground and meditating to Amaradheva all day for fear of seeing something shameful.

But wait! nobody you know has actually met anyone who has a problem with it. The leading voices of the opposition’s masses seem like dozens.

Day 8: *Bad News* *pain* *More Bad News* *despair*

Day 9: Watch a few videos on youtube.

Ladies and Gentlemen; The Truth!

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Truth. This post will be that post you read and then print and frame a copy of. If you’re a man that is. If you’re a woman you’ll… I don’t know, what are you doing on the internet anyway? Get back to the kitchen or we’ll revoke your Praveena allowance.

I just read THIS post on Mathawaada by the Foxhound. It prompted me to first take manly swig of air in my lungs and roar like a lion having its tail caught in an elevator door. Then it prompted me to come here and jot down a clarification on what’s what in the world of terrorism.

This great big blue whale of a lie about men being wrapped around the little finger of these women “flaunting their stuff” is such a pile of Nokias* it might as well be a post by a female. A woman can shed pheromones like a rabid hyena in heat but no self-respecting man is going to envy the crevasse of a bosom like lemmings to a cliff.

I like to think of myself as a normal male. When I’m not running over vegetarians and throwing cabbages at feminists, that is. As of now I live in the sticks, study in the sticks and also work in the sticks. If it weren’t for other people I’d never see the inside of a Barista in years. So if anything seeing an attractive, intelligent female should be an event of celestial proportions for me.

And you know what happens when I do come across a member of the opposite sex who is both attractive and manages to “flaunt” her stuff? I usually start off by insulting them and then if they hang around I usually don’t drop to my knees and wail at them to allow me to worship at the altar of their feminine ways. No man not living in a basement and whose only idea of women is the product of a Japanese cartoonist being impaled by a dozen tentacles is likely to drool like a biped bovine.

And no, unlike the original poster, I don’t mind the risk of being called misogynistic. God knows you’ve had plenty of opportunity in all the previous posts.

*Refer this post for the Nokia thing.

I Ttly Love Nokia

My phone’s been crashing a lot lately. It’s not even like it’s a very complex phone. My phone, when compared to something like the Nexus One would look like a few scrawled X’s on some prehistoric cave. Okay maybe not that bad but… an abacus. Yes. An abacus made of sand.

So yesterday when the screen went white and it refused to start, I took out the battery and waited a few minutes before restarting. It started up again but nearly all my applications were missing. Opera, eBuddy et al. Thankfully my contacts were still intact. But what I miss most are all the bookmarks I had in Opera Mini. I know I should have synched it but last time I tried to do that through Opera Link, it synched the default bookmarks on my online account to my phone, wiping out the ones on the phone instead of vice versa.

I had a vague feeling of knowing that I should be geeky enough to figure out a way to get it to work but meh. So cursing Nokia for building not so complex phones that crashed like complex phones, I tried to download opera and all my other apps all over again. But since Nokia is full of surprises, like Herpes, I found that I now had no browser to get online since even the default browser on this phone(5130XM) is Opera Mini.

Since S40 has some kind of built in browser, I tried to see if I could navigate to other sites from the hyperlinks in the phone for places like game downloads. It didn’t work. What’s more my phone decided to throw in a big bundle of screaming harpies and discard most of my messages too. Every ten messages or so there’d be a blank space. Accessing these meant a restart.

After a couple of hours of feeling strangely disconnected due to not being able to tweet about how I didn’t have access to twitter, I got home and downloaded all the stuff I needed through my PC.

So now I have a partially malfunctioning Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, Any idea where I can get it fixed? Or do you want to buy the thing? I’ll even autograph it if you want.

I Wasn’t Inspired

But I liked it.

I’m not sure why it’s called an Inspirational Swan Lake though. To my layman mind, it was to swan lake what a camel is to an elephant. Both have the same basic structure, like how both involve much dance and great music, but you reach a point where you just don’t know what to make of the trunk. Okay so maybe the story isn’t what’s important. But then why call it that? I couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot, and neither could people around me. The gender reversal was easy to take, but then all these other characters popped in and I was wondering if I was in the right play.

Now, if the whole premise of the thing was to focus on the whole “performance” aspect of things, the performance being the choreography, it was pretty good. It was entertaining. They did a great job of… doing stuff… in time to the amazing music. The entire performance was great, except for the fact that my mind kept roaming all over the events that unfolded trying to find what the heck was going on. I put it down to me being too uncultured. But then again if it were really that great it should make at least something apparent to the observer.

As for being inspired, I don’t know what the big deal was. A bunch of people prancing about on stage does not inspire me much, even if a few of them were deaf or blind or Mac users, it just didn’t make my brain explode into a great big hailstorm of sexism and ways to photoshop people’s faces into humorous images.

Watching just the performance is great, though pretty much like watching Transformers 2 or something. Wait, I know I can connect the two somehow. Ah!

In one it’s a bunch of people practicing long hours to carry out some slick dance moves etc. etc. In the other, it’s a bunch of people putting many years of practice to use to create some pretty slick eye candy.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but when you come down to it, neither made much of an impact, except for one having music that I’m going to go find. But that’s not something you can attribute to the performers.

And finally, in the souvenir, the actors had stage names. Why?

New Job

Recently, I decided to send in an application for a vacancy advert I saw in the papers, and ended up being employed. I start work this Wednesday.

This is a big blow to humankind as they’ve lost their pioneering freelance “How to get them from the Boardroom Back to the Kitchen” researcher. Analysts say the field may take years to recover from the hit. Militant feminist groups the world over celebrated by using aprons for target practice, when they weren’t stealing ribs from men. Experts say the human race might go hungry in the next few dozen years.

At my first interview, I had to fill out a form full of personal details, such as “Previous place of employment”, “Parents’ Names”, “Reliability” and “Ownership of pets which can be made an example of”. After I triumphantly filled out all the details and handed it in, commenting to the secretary on how I’d plundered the form’s fields and heard the lamentations of its women, I sheepishly slunk back to the chair, trying to avoid the icy cold “Too corny even for you” stare.

As I sat uncomfortably on one of those little coffee tables with a backrest that people call office furniture, the guy next to me, another interviewee, looked at me and smiled. I smiled back like any normal person. He then introduced himself, to which I replied with my name.

Apparently he was a guy who liked computers, music and all things outdoors, which I take to be things like garden hoses and pedophiles. After a brief exchange I discovered he liked pink shirts, and was only wearing a white one that day because it was in the laundry.

After ascertaining that he wasn’t BatmanI asked him where he had worked before applying here. I was recited a name of a large advertising firm everyone had heard of. By the look he gave me after that, it was quite clear that he wanted me to tell him where I worked previously. Either that or he was a little uncomfortable about sitting on what looked like a loveseat with me.

Since my previous place of employment was probably reduced to a few scrawled names on a pile of foreclosure notices by now, I told him “Well I once managed to get three toys at once out of the claw machine at the carnival…”

He laughed at me. So I pulled him by the tie and smacked his face on the cover of my portfolio CD. He looked at me, flabbergasted, as if I’d said something like “flabbergasted”.

“You shall rot in the eternal fires of hell, fiend” he slowly said as I stood up and walked towards the offices as my name had been called. I waved at him and was tempted to tell him a story about how ages ago when my dad was driving he swerved off the road and hit a cow, but unfortunately she got up again with minimal injuries and went on to get married and give birth to him, but I just said “A special place is reserved in hell for people who like pink shirts, ya fairy”

After that decidedly un-awesome exit, I entered the office of the man who was to interview me.

And sat through the easiest interview of my life. Granted I’d only ever been to one interview before that, but still. It went well.

And so the future of this blog depends a lot on whether I can post from work or whether I’ll get lazy and neglect it. But I doubt that, being the attention seeker I am.