Yesterday night I dreamt of Manish S. Chauhan, which is probably a telepathic reminder for me to spew something out in this damned blob of a blog.

My ankle hurts. It has degenerative arthritis. My back hurts. There is a muscle tear and yesterday I fell out of my bathtub, letting the sink do a number on my back. Luckily my head did not hit the sink, the sink might not have held much water after that. My knees hurt. They had partially torn ligaments. And to top it all I lost my league match in squash yesterday. No, not a happy state of affairs. Bah.

Just came back from a seminar on Fluid Mechanics. Rather soporific. It reinforces my belief that there should only be two kinds of seminars 1) where the seminar speaker has something of genuine scientific import to impart (i like that play on words) or 2) the speaker is, well, a good speaker, an interesting one. This fellow, like most, was neither. Such speakers should take up blogging to fulfill their desire to be heard.

To end on a more cheerful note, here is a mathematical anecdote. I have tons of these. Duady, (close enough, he is french after all, and you can never satisfy them) a mathematician at Nice is rather eccentric. Unfortunately, unlike most of us, he is genuinely eccentric. Thus, he frequently overlooks small things like his wife absconding with his best friend while he, the best friend, was staying with him. Or his not noticing that some of his best results were, how should I say, "borrowed" by the same friend. But the one that takes the cake was the time he was told by the head of the department at Nice to wear shoes. You see Duady was not in the habit of wearing shoes, or for that matter, any footwear to the University. His overgrown toe nails were a matter of pride, euphoria and nausea. Any way matters came to head and the head ordered him to put on some shoes. The next day saw Duady walking around in, what looked from afar, black shoes. Closer inspection disclosed them to be his famous feet, covered fashionably by black shoe polish. Just another thing he overlooked while worrying about the intricacies of complex dynamics.

As one moves around in the world the homily "Anything you can do, someone can do much, much better" hits home. Take running. I though I was adequate; not great, but adequate. After all 4.5 mi in 32 minutes is nothing to sneeze at. After coming 25th in a field of 25 with several girls ahead of me, one sees the astonishin lack of self appraisal. The club is Cambridge Hare and Hounds. Great club. Google CUHH and find out. These guys do 3mi in 15 minutes. Shit.

Obviously the same is true in Mechanics. There are people out there who have more mechanics in their little fingers that I could ever imagine. I am just hope that most of them are otherwise occupied.

One thing you do notice in the UK is that people are so much better dressed. Incredible, when you think that Cambridge is a university town and academics are paid much less than their counterparts in the US. I was going to get twice the amount if I had accepted the offer from JPL. But despite this American's dress like tramps who don't care too much about their public image.

The roads here are very narrow. The buses are just as big. Sometime even bigger (double deckers). They are driven at high speeds relative to the amount of space available for navigation. All this makes cyclists like me rather nervous. Buses habitually pass within half a foot of my cycle. At these moments one can just be thankful of having grown up in an Indian ethos, where one is required to do what one has to do and then whatevere has to happen, will happen.

Oh well, written too much for today. Whether or not wisdom is gained with age, verbosity certainly is.

Throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, writers of hard boiled fiction hunted for that perfect riposte. That reply, that one sentence that would leave the other guy writhing on the floor, covered with ignominy. In my (not so humble) opinion, Raymond Chandler came closest. The perfect response to a wisecrack from some cleverdick is, actually, no reply. That is right, no response, a silence that shouts "Is this the best you could do, you poor pea-brained pansy?". His lead, Philip Marlowe demonstrates this beautifully.

Nothing of note today, so far anyway. Did come across a statement, alleged to BCCI that "The cricket team does not represent India, but a private club: the BCCI". Nerve? Stupidity or our cupidity?

... sat at lunch with an asian lady who kept on telling the world how bright her children were and how, once you have a family you have to make sacrifices: good school for her kids etc. etc. blah! Anyway, I told her that schools are a waste of time. That shut her up... for about 34 seconds.

A friend called me up yesterday. Talked to him after 5 years. Back then he sounded like he had nothing to say to me. Now he has nothing to say to me. Time.