Random post

Before I put Farewell, my Concubine on my Netflix queue, I read the story synopsis real quick. Clearly, I didn't read it properly. For some reason I assumed the friendship was between a guy and a girl. I spent the first 20 minutes of the movie trying to figure out if Douzi was a girl or a guy. Chinese names don't help any..they are completely asexual. Anyway, the movie was just about OK. A little slow and way too long for a movie in Mandarin, a language I cannot fathom inspite of spending 2 years in the company of Chinese people on a daily basis. Plus, the Chinese music grates on your ears after a while. (If a man is singing in a female voice, it can hardly be melodious. Shrieky is the word that comes to mind.)) And they show the same damn opera about 30 times in the course of 3 hours. I liked Gong Li's performance. And Leslie Cheung was a drama queen par extraordinaire. But strictly OK otherwise. The only good thing was that I got to impress my lab at lunch the next day with my intimate knowledge of the personal life of all the lead actors.

This whole magic candle thing is kinda scary. I kept trying to blow the thing out and it wouldn't extinguish. I had serious misgivings about my lung capacity for about 30 seconds, before the cat was let out of the bag.

OK..anybody know why this article in the ToI about a scientific paper has a sentence referring to some Greek island (the island is totally irrelevant to autophagy as far as I know)?

I just watched Atonement. Its totally, completely awesome. But I think I have now reached my threshold for movies that require a brain, or even half a brain, in order to enjoy them. Considering that Netflix has just sent me a documentary entitled "God grew tired of us", it doesn't look too good. I may have to watch Rush Hour3 on TBS to allow my brain cells a much needed rest.