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.