Books

In lieu of a getting a substantial free time with no great plans (and possibility thereof in absence of company) recently, I managed to set aside some time for reading.

I read a book called "11 minutes". Call me shallow or whatever, but only thing I remember about this book is that it is excruciatingly boring. I finished it only for one reason. To punish myself, for starting it.

I read "Its not about the bike"; the autobiography of Lance Armstrong. Have nothing but respect, for the man. I have been feeling this utter need to buy my own bike for some time since then. Sometimes during the night I sit on my doorsteps having tea or just staring in oblivion, when this red light flickering on one of the mountains invariably catches my attention. I appears to beckon me [:)]. Anyways, it is often as easy to distract me, as to distract me to something else. Hence, lately, I've been thinking less about it.

Currently, I am reading the 'Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy' series by Douglas Adams. I've completed the first two parts, out of the four. I like the sense of humor used in the novel. At the same time, it gives me a feeling of strange indifference, about things happening on earth. With all we know, its such a huge place. But for a hitchhiker, its just another station. And in the scheme of universe, just a dot* ! (Plus, while earlier I had never given a thought to it, I feel now that its pretty plausible that life may exist on other planets.**). Apart from that, my status message, for quite sometime now, has been 'DON'T PANIC' written in large friendly letters. Weirdly enough, I've tried to remove it a few times; and each time I have done that, the universe adapted itself in such a way that it actually seemed to fit more than anything else.


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* Well don't blame me, thats what the book does to you.
** And this too.

Infinity

An interesting observation. Perhaps things that are 'infinite' don't give a perceptible feel of infinity. Things that are very huge but finite do. Of course, infinity is a well researched topic and with all due respect, getting into confrontation with the mathematicians over it would be the last thing I want to do. But I am just comparing here two feelings: the one of watching the sky; and the one of watching an ocean. Sky/space being supposedly 'infinite', one seems to take its infinity forgranted, and simply credits it less for being infinite. An ocean, on the other hand, being finite, but so huge, tanatalizes us with the curiosity about its actual size. The very knowledge that it is finite and hence fathomable, but the desperate inability to actually fathom it, leads us to believe, that well, this thing is literally infinite !

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[:)]

Cake

Well, all of us have heard the quote "To eat your cake and have it too". And whilst I have an idea what it is supposed to mean, there seems to be a pit fall in logic. I think whoever phrased it seems to have assumed that having the cake is as important as eating it; which is not really always the case. If you don't eat it, don't you think having it is useless in the first place [:)] . Secondly, with its limited life, you can't hold it long either; whether you eat it or not. So you might not have the cake even if you don't eat it. And if you ate the cake, it seems irrelevant whether you had it or not [;)]. Hence, since eating the cake seems to carry more weight, the two actions should not be dealt in unison.

And while I was writing this trash, I made a quick check on what Wikipedia has to say about the phrase. Some exerpts from it:

The phrase's earliest recording is from 1546 as "wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?" (John Heywood's 'A dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue') alluding to the impossibility of eating your cake and still having it afterwards; the modern version (where the clauses are reversed) is a corruption which was first signalled in 1812.

Comedian George Carlin once critiqued this idiom by saying, "When people say, 'Oh you just want to have your cake and eat it too.' What good is a cake you can't eat? What should I eat, someone else's cake instead?".

Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University, points out that the original and only sensible version of this saying is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” meaning that if you eat your cake you won’t have it any more. People get confused because we use the expression “have some cake” to mean “eat some cake,” and they therefore misunderstand what “have” means in this expression.^[1] Alternatively, people understand that "have" and "eat" represent a sequence of actions, so one can indeed "have" one's cake and then "eat" it. Consequently, the literal meaning of the reversed idiom doesn't match the metaphorical meaning.

To sum up, I should go home now.

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[:)]

Shopping tip.

A handy shopping tip: Do not shop in a food store when you're hungry. Before you know it, you'll end up buying the entire store. (Someone from inside would keep crying out aloud: I need that.. that too.. oh common, what would I do with just two .. five pack is cheaper......).

Eat something, and then shop. And whenever you come across something that you shouldn't buy, you'll blissfully say .. "No thanks, I am full "..

Always works.

[:)]