Sonata in blue and orange

New jeans for old?

“No trade” says Marabelle

Noisome is good

Leonardo's Code

Extract from The Leonardo Code, which is much more fun and far better written than the Dan Brown abortion. As with all of Pratchett's work, you actually have to have brains and a certain amount of education to start LoL. And then, you begin to think.

Leonard brightened up as a thought apparently struck him. ‘Now you asked me to construct some more ciphers for you. I'm sorry, my lord, but I must have misunderstood your requirements. What was wrong with the first ones I did?'
Vetinari sighed. 'I'm afraid they were unbreakable, Leonard.'
'But surely-'
'It's hard to explain,' said Lord Vetinari, aware that what to him were the lucid waters of politics were so much mud to Leonard. 'These new ones you have are…merely devilishly difficult?'
'You specified fiendishly, sir,' said Leonard, looking worried.
'Oh, yes.'
'There does not appear to be a common standard for fiends, my lord, but I did some research in the more accessible occult texts and I believe these ciphers will be considered "difficult" by more than 96 percent of fiends.'

Haiku

Monkeys Masturbate

Fig leaves fall on the fence

Tiglath looks askance

Unique Eunuch Blessings

My cat Pantha is destined to have a long life and prosper. She possesses the (probably) unique distinction of being the only cat in Delhi to be blessed by a Eunuch.

The little twit (Bongs will understand what the name means) fell off a tree and broke her left hind-leg. So, we had to take her off to the vet (Dr R.S.Chaggar of Saket and SDA, who has the fastest hands I’ve seen when it comes to cat surgery). Doc sent us off to get an X-ray.

Now small animals are x-rayed at the same clinics as human beings and quite a few city clinics will provide this service. However the average North Indian is squeamish at the thought that the same Roentgen rays which passed through a small furry animal may pass through his bones. So the clinics usually ask you to wait discreetly at the side-entrance and smuggle you in so as not to spook their two-legged clients.

Now the clinic we visited operates out of the front of the owner’s house. The daughter of the doctor who owns it was getting married. There was an ashirwad or some such interminable ceremony happening in the garden. This being North India, natch there were Hijras singing contralto (contrary to public opinion, eunuchs don’t sing soprano though some of them can do a nice counter-tenor).

We were waiting at the back door to be called in. Pantha was sedated and sleeping in her carry basket, which was discreetly covered with a cloth. (Hint: if you’re transporting cats it helps to cover the basket – the little buggers are always less antsy when they can’t see the world pass by.) To all the world, and certainly to the hijras on the lookout for a mark, we must have looked like a worried couple with swaddled child.

They leapt upon us with glad cries and were disconcerted when I made an obscene gesture, which is peculiar to Hijra sign-language. They were mind-fucked when my missus laughed heartily at offers of blessing. However, when we unveiled P, who slept through it all, one of them bravely offered to do the needful. What’s more, they didn’t charge us. So P is doubly unique – she’s been blessed free of charge by an eunuch.

Update: She is happily climbing trees and killing lizards so the leg has healed fine.

Infructious, Infuckious

Do you know what an “infructious investment” is? It’s buying or creating a backup when somebody else believes that you don’t need one. For example, if you have a legal life partner and you go out and acquire another partner (perhaps because you’re dissatisfied with the first partner or fear that he/she may prove unsatisfactory in servicing your future needs), the expenses you incur may be considered an “infructious investment”.

The Indian government is a little confused on this subject. It’s okay for example, to create a new fibre-optic network in an area already serviced by one. Or to buy a new PC even if the old one is working fine. Or for an individual to possess two or more cars.

But it’s not okay to be legally bound to more than one life-partner unless you are a Muslim of the male gender – in that case, you’re allowed to have up to four before you're pulled up for making infructious investments (in this particular instance, it's called "polygamy").

According to the GoI, it’s also definitely not okay to lay a second gas pipeline in an area already serviced by one. It doesn’t matter if the extant pipeline is insufficient to service demand or if the transporter’s service standards suck.

The new PNGRBA – the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board Act, which has finally passed into law after a four-year saga of drafting and redrafting, states that a second pipeline would be an infructious investment.

It may be noted that when GAIL laid its first-ever pipeline, it assumed that a capacity of 18 million metric standard cubic metres of gas per day was sufficient. Then it expanded to 33 mmscmd. By the time that expansion was complete, it was already planning to double capacity. The demand-supply gap is such that the gas transport market needs to minimally double capacity inside the next five years. Supreme Court judgments over the past few years also clearly point to the need to beef up city gas distribution networks across every metro-semi-metro in order to create public transport services that operate off less polluting CNG.

But any such investment in a new gas pipeline (unless it’s by Gail perhaps) would be infructious if said pipeline happens to fall within the service area of an extant pipeline. If this is the best Act that a multitude of drafts could produce, the lunacy must be both infectious and infructious across the stakeholder universe.

Underwhelmed

I am underwhelmed. Sometime in the recent past, two of my pals randomly linked to this thingy.
As a result random hordes of people wandered in from all parts of the globe. Some of them even came back. Whyfore?

Anyway this is a non-blog. I grabbed the url to prevent somebody else from doing this (this form of identity theft has actually occurred to me - some bloke from West Virginia once opened an email id on verizon and started mailing people with (rather good) investment advice saying he was me.)

That led to major buggery because all the people I had refused to offer advice to got offended and demanded to know what they should do with their ill-gotten gains.

I am a refusenik I refuse to offer investment advice, I refuse to blog and I refuse all offers of employment.

But I didn't want somebody to set up a blog in my name and burble nonsense. Now I am informed by She who must not be named that if I don't occasionally post, blogspot will take this url away. I don't believe it. However here we go.

If I have thots on a subject and I cannot figure out how to bullshit somebody into paying me to write them down, I might put it down here .

Live in hope!