FH team: its not working
Neurotron | 29 June 2004, 10:51am
tried everything man. Aint happening. Is it a template problem?
Current Mood: Confused
Current Music: not now
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Fullhyd team.
Neurotron | 28 June 2004, 2:12pm
Help.
Current Mood: Confused
Current Music: Say Something - Haven
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FH! Comments deleting how to do the?
Neurotron | 28 June 2004, 9:10am
I remember seeing the option of 'delete this comment' some time back. How can I do it now?
Current Mood: Confused
Current Music: A man needs to be told - The Charlatans
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Males : a study in effective communication
Neurotron | 24 June 2004, 11:29pm
Male communication rocks.
Me: Hello?
V: Chal ra? (I want to smoke. I would like you to come too)
Me: Hmmm..Ok. Chicha's in 5? (You know I don't smoke much. But I'll come anyway. The usual place?5 minutes?)
V: Bye.
V: *looking at me* (We have nothing better to do. Let's get drunk. Whaddaya say?)
Me: *looking at A* (Alright! Great idea. You coming too, right? Cmon man...you know you want to...you can pay me later)
A: *looking at V* (Bastard...this is all your fault! Putting me in this position...)
*looking at me* (Bastard...I'm going to become a drunkard because of the two of you..oh, what the heck...)
All start smiling, which turns into laughter which turns into guffaws (Fuck it! Let's go get pissed!!)
At The Rock (7 km away) in 20 minutes, with booze (bottles, glasses AND coke), ciggies (just the CORRECT number) AND snacks. The friggin' epitome of effective communication and efficiency.
Note: all in the days before cell phones.
Male communication ROCKS.
Current Mood: Amazed
Current Music: Lounge
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List of topics that cannot be discussed over alcohol
Neurotron | 22 June 2004, 7:14pm
1.
(thinking...thinking...)
Current Mood: Itching For One
Current Music: Sail away with me - David Grey
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Baraka
Neurotron | 16 June 2004, 7:00am
I was stoned.
We were at Pradeek's place. It must've been the second or third time I'd met him. He was Koshy's childhood friend, a British citizen, pothead, amazing storyteller and discussion-holder. Pradeek told us about this fabulous film he'd come across called 'Baraka' and that we had to watch it. He actually spent 150 pounds and bought a DVD player just to watch the opening scene of this film. For a garrulous chap, he was actually finding it difficult to explain what this film was about. But he guaranteed it was amazing and we would not regret it.
But, there's always time for a li'l smoke first.
Being a non-regular, I'm not too keen on watching films high. Cinema is an experience in itself, and I prefer enjoying it as such. But Pradeek could not have been more spot on with this one. Those 95 minutes were surreal. After the keener ones got higher, we settled down to watch. The best part about being stoned in a group is that there's a sense of security and togetherness but everyone is too busy tripping on their own to disturb the peace and tranquility with unnecessary chatter. I was a little worried that the hype might detract from the enjoyment. Not a chance. And the first scene set the pace - it blew us away.
A monkey among snow-clad mountains. Before dawn. Just doing it's own monkey thing. But there was something different. It seemed to be so calm, serene almost. Unusual, you might agree, for a monkey. It moved slowly over to a small pond. The pond was partially frozen over but there was some part still in liquid phase. Amazingly, the monkey went calmly into the water. I was freezing just watching this, but the monkey thought nothing of it. It just sat there. It seemed to be waiting for something. Ah, the sun. The sun slowly crept over the mountains. The monkey knew exactly where it was going to rise from. It kept its eyes trained on the sun for a little while, closed its eyes...
...and began to meditate.
We had no words. Not just the concept, which is not entirely unheard of, but the way the scene was shot. And it only kept getting better. I don't think any film has imprinted so many images in my memory with just one viewing. I realised I had been holding my breath.
I exhaled.
Baraka - the breath, the essence of life.
Current Mood: Amazed
Current Music: Always with me, always with you - Joe Satriani
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Cleanse
Neurotron | 15 June 2004, 11:45am
Destiny’s pregnant
with my fragile, unborn future
Yesterday’s trespasses are tightly sewn
I thought ; you ripped out the sutures
Tomorrow’s now a little less perfect, a little torn
And today’s still waters breed, grow stagnant.
Yet Time flows
washes warm over past misdeeds
Cleanses; as an indulgent mother
goes to work again with needle and thread
picks out the defective, destructive seeds
makes again my fallow bed
and with hope anew endows.
Tomorrow will wax brighter yet
And I will be cleansed of your debt.
The birth will be easy, the child less fragile
And I...
I will smile.
Current Mood: Feeling Better
Current Music: One - U2
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In the evening
Neurotron | 14 June 2004, 10:42am
Home.
The only sound in the dusty driveway lined by trees is the rhythmic purring of my bike. I turn off the engine, close my eyes, take a deep breath and breathe in the evening. It fills me just as it itself is filled with possibility. Pregnant.
I park the bike and pull out the house keys from my pocket. The satisfying click in the lock seems to be the prelude to a beautiful symphony, one that I, and only I, can conduct.
I walk over to the dark, panelled cabinet. The sun hasn't set yet. The yellow, oblique rays seem to be tilting their heads and smiling at me - just like you do sometimes. As I pour out a drink, the light stirs some faint memory. Like something I've seen in a movie, like the evening on some Texan ranch with miles and miles of beautiful, pristine farmland around. A twinkle catches my eye. It's the glass. The light reflecting off the intricately cut crystal, mixing, blending with the perfect drink and enhancing its soothing, mellowing effect. I find the remote and turn on the player. I make my way to the outside, climb the short ladder, onto the roof. In the dim light of the setting sun, the sweet strains of Miles Davis take me with them. Far away. Further and further, until I can almost see tomorrow on the horizon.
Wish you were here.
Current Mood: Thoughtful
Current Music: Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
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Focus
Neurotron | 10 June 2004, 7:48pm
Wise man said - nothing focusses the mind like impending mortal danger.
Or something along those lines. And how true.
Need focus in life? Want to know what you really want from it all? Think of 10 things you want to do before you die. List them, according to priority if you choose. They could be anything, from planting a tree to re-establishing lines of communication with a family member; from reading a particular book to talking to the Pope. As you keep identifying, focussing and achieving, you gradually separate the truly important from the merely interesting. The method from the madness. The emotion from the music.
It works wonderfully.
Current Mood: Amazed
Current Music: For the love of God - Steve Vai
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Now.
Neurotron | 8 June 2004, 10:23pm
And now, as before,
the colour fades from your cheeks
and from my glasses.
Fate's shackled palette now spews
uncertainly; spurting irrelevant hues,
colouring dark our biggest truths
and our smallest farces.
And now, as never,
I dissipate uncomplaining into the void
you created.
Where there were vortexes of silences sublime
words now dissolve into noisy, unending mime.
Here, then, lies the greatest love of all,
now abbreviated.
Current Mood: Heartbroken
Current Music: I hope you dance - LeeAnn Rimes
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Why its called Pub craaawwwll
Neurotron | 7 June 2004, 5:54pm
So I was invited to go on a pub crawl with my PhD seniors.
Harry explained the concept. You pick a Tube line(on the London Underground), stop at every station, go to the nearest pub and up-end a pint. Repeat ad infinitum, or till pass outum (just puking doesn't count). Oh yeah, or till the line ends. Of course, you can't really just stay wherever you end up (yeah, cos THAT would be stupid, right?). So lines must be picked carefully. The best ones have friends who live at the end of the line. If not, you reach the end and do the same thing on the way back, if you can make out the difference by then, that is. At some point, it gets a little fuzzy whether you're coming or going.
So Harry tells me how he and his friends once picked the circle line. They did the whole line once and then a half. 36 stations. They were smashed by about 15. Sheer determination and single minded devotion to the goal kept them going. Yeah, right. Sheer blinkin' stupidity and the Jackass mentality, more like. And what a perfect line to pick - the Circle line. Because, you guessed it, technically, it never ends. Plus the fact that they had no clue what was going on.
You get so drunk that pretty soon, a pub crawl becomes simply a game of Follow the Leader. The first challenge in this game in this situation is to identify the leader. Then comes walking (that thing where you put one foot in front of the other), THEN following. It's not easy. And matters are not helped when 'leaders' begin changing at every station/pub. Pretty soon, all 'leader' means to you is the guy immediately in front of you. You can't really see much beyond him and this person in the jacket, whom you've never seen before, is the only person you really trust.
After the first 15, the boys were on a strict regimen consisting of the following :
1. Get into Tube.
2. Try to make out the difference between 'moving' and 'not moving'. Not moving just might mean 'stop/station'. Get out of Tube.
3. Try to focus on area with bright lights and fast music. Go in. Shit, not pub. Lots of pink stuff. Shit, adult store. Get out of adult store.
4. Try and focus on area with dim lights and loud voices.
5. Go to such area.
6. Drink.
7. Piss.
8. Puke.
9. Drink.
10. Get out of pub. Walk.
11. Try and focus to see where lots of people are headed.
12. Follow.
13. Shit, back at the same pub. This is NOT right! The rules MUST be followed! Only ONE drink per stop! Feel rather righteous.
14. Get out of pub.
15. Try and locate Tube station (with the same line as the one you got off from - there are RULES!)
16. Go back to step 1.
It's called a 'crawl' because 30,000 years of evolution will be worth exactly an arse's bollocks after 30 pints of lager. You obviously cannot walk and make about as much sense as a demented sloth.
Harry paid (maybe not dearly enough) for his lovely experience. He was so dehydrated and his stomach had shrunk so much he couldn't keep down food or drink for 2 days. He vaguely remembers a police station but he's not sure why. It took him 4 days to realise he was 2 days late for work. Oh yes, Harry paid.
And I was about to.
Current Mood: Sloshed
Current Music: Lets all get drunk tonight - Afroman
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Desire
Neurotron | 4 June 2004, 1:30pm
I've been taking some of these rather self-congratulatory online tests / quizzes.
The more of these dumbass tests I take, and the more questions about myself I answer, the more I'm hit by the sad realisation that I'm just not what I used to be anymore.
The fire's gone. The passion's on holiday. The zest is on leave. And the spark...I have no idea what's happened to the spark.
Yeah yeah, the tests are stupid and don't necessarily reflect on anything. But I look at the choices, see what I might have ticked just 3 years ago, and what I'm ticking now.
I feel old.
And I don't like it.
Is this what happens as we age? I want to feel a passion for some things. But it must be an all-encompassing passion, not a passing phase. I want to fight for something, to defend my belief. Sitting here all day, working for some company, getting paid, going home, watching TV, watching movies, playing the guitar, talking to friends, reading some book, listening to the same music...all this just doesn't do it for me anymore.
Ennui.
Give me back those days of thunder. Give me back that burning desire for tomorrow. Give me back that unpredictability, that heady feeling of not being in control yet willing to do ANYthing. Give me back the thrill of not knowing what I, myself, am going to do in the next five minutes.
Give me back the chaos of love. Give me back the risk of not eating tomorrow because I spent all my money on a movie today. Give me back the joy of risking it all, losing, and still thinking it was a damn good ride. Give me back the exhilaration of righteous defiance. Give me back the fearlessness. Give me back the illogicity. Give me back the wonder. Give me new rules so I can remember what it felt like to break the old rules with impunity.
Bring back the wild child, the maverick.
Give ME back.
Current Mood: Thoughtful
Current Music: Desire - U2
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Mars and Venus
Neurotron | 3 June 2004, 12:15pm
Men and Women are very, very different. Get used to it, it ain't gonna change anytime soon.
I recently read an entry on another blog about changing perceptions, the sexual revolution, and how they've affected women. It got me thinking. I did agree with a lot that lady said, and I really liked her perspective. I have a lot of respect for women who realise that men and women should not be compared on certain levels and that the whole "equality" thing is just a pile of crap.
I hope I can put all my ideas in a clear, logical manner (it all seemed so damn clear last night, in the 10 minutes before I fell asleep). Let's start with the women's lib movement. Its basic claim is that women are as good or better than men in any/all field(s). Am I the only one who feels this is an absolutely ridiculous notion? If it were the case, why have 2 sexes in the first place? Why wouldn't evolution have made us all equal, and capable of reproducing asexually? Because males and females are basically designed for different functions.
Neither sex is 'smarter' in an absolute sense. Men and women are equally intelligent and adept - just at different things. For example, women are basically not as good drivers as men(please don't bother arguing, it's a scientific fact). This is because women are not as good at judging spatial distances as men. Males developed this skill as a survival mechanism during the hunting-gathering stage. Males are better equipped genetically for things like driving. Yes, there are very good women drivers. But they are a sufficiently small percentage of driving women, and an even smaller percentage of women as a whole, to not be taken into account here.
Men are not as good cooks, home makers, or instinctual parents as women. Maternal instinct is such a bloody powerful thing. Mothers today still have it genetically, because the ancestral females had no other way of communication with the young offspring. That instinct is something men can never hope to develop. Do you see men looking at a baby and going 'Awwww..I want one of thooooseee!" No. But a woman might, because the instinct is already there and aroused at the presence of a young, helpless child. Cooking and home making come in the package deal. Now, some of the best chefs in the world are men, but by the same argument as earlier, they can be discounted.
There are many, many other things where this theory applies but I won't go into them - they just go into loop arguments. Let's just say that at an individual level, men and women are equal and deserve the same things. Happiness or satisfaction with one's life, for example.
For the survival and continuation of our species, we need families. Two parents works just fine for us - we have thousands of years of history as evidence. Social evolution has brought the concept of marriage. Fine. Now, purely on a happiness scale, how do you think the East and the 'developed' West compare in marital happiness (in urban populations)? Not too well. It's very well known that divorce, broken homes, traumatised childhoods leading to deviant/disfunctional adulthoods are far more common in the West. Why? Because the East has more or less stuck to the basics.
Sex.
As the great man said, it's finally basically fundamentally ultimately in the end all about sex. And however much we try to hide from it, it's very, very logical. Males need sex. Males want sex. Sex is designed to be pleasurable for males (alright, MORE pleasurable). Males are designed to procreate. DESIGNED. In the evolutionary years, if you were a male and you were still alive, you musta done SOMEthing goddamn right. You were probably better suited for survival because your genes were better than the next chump's. So kindly fuck around as much as possible to give your progeny the best chance of surviving, and propagating a stronger, hopefully genetically superior generation. Males have polygamy ingrained in their genes. It's like driving.
To the women, sex is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. A little thought, and it becomes a little clearer that the basic act of intercourse is not designed to be pleasurable to females, Remember, I said BASIC. That's right. Missionary. Wham bam, look Ma, I'm done types. Basic. The genetic drive of the female is stability. For her progeny. For herself. The father has good genes ('cos he was ALIVE) and she was picked because though the male is designed to want to hump anything that moves, given a choice, the male's mating instinct leads him to the best bearer of his progeny. Factor also that males produce sperm all their lives while females lose reproductive capacity at a certain age, you might begin to see why males always look for younger, better, models. But the female always wants stability. It's genetic. Like the maternal instinct.
Now, factor society, marriage and it's concepts of monogamy, emotion and love...and it gets a whole world more complicated. Not to say that's bad. Hey, we've survived thus far, head of the food chain, brought the planet to its knees...we have a lot to be proud of.
Picture this. Within our social settings, the man still wants sex most of the time. There's a primary need that needs satisfying. The woman is not too keen, but gives it to him. Whenever, wherever, whatever. The man's thrilled. That's all he wants, really. So he doesn't feel the need to 'stray'. Has his progeny, supports them (after all, they ARE the way to ensure the perpetuation of his genes), keeps the family happy. The woman has the children, and satisfies the burning maternal instinct. She's safe, children safe and decent future assured - stability. That's all she wants, really.
Man: not too keen on stability, but will stay if sex is good.
Woman: not too keen on sex, but will give if stability is assured.
Since men and women are EQUAL in all areas except those based on instinct and physical capabilities, a compromise is made on the fundamental issues. With our modern outlook, both men and women are free to do whatever else they want. As long as nothing affects the family unit. Family safe. Both parties more or less happy and satisfied (isn't that what we all want, ultimately?). Good/best chances of progeny survival and procreation.
Think it'll work??
Marry me!
Current Music: Its been a while - Staind
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Ruffled
Neurotron | 2 June 2004, 6:11pm
I do believe a few feathers have been ruffled by the last post. So here is the clarification.
It was actually intended to be funny. I guess the humour in the voice doesn't always translate onto the text. Anyway, I was imagining saying it to a friend of mine, who does this just to piss me off (and partly because he doesn't understand the meaning). I know for a fact he would have laughed at the way I said it and the purpose would have been achieved - he would have made the correction.
And this has been going on for a while, so I was pissed off. This is my name here, in this virtual land. People like to be called by their names. It's as simple as that. Friends, family, and people I like or admire are allowed to modify it. Probably the mode of correction I used could have been better. But hey, I had to let off some steam.
The good thing though, is that there are still people who understand, and forget easily, once the issue is sorted out.
[A, A, - you guys know this is not about you. DR - thanks, again :-)]
Current Mood: Itching For One
Current Music: The Talented Mr. Ripley - Miles Davis
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Names
Neurotron | 2 June 2004, 2:45pm
Sometimes, stuff just has to be said.
First things first - the name is NeuROtron. Not 'neutron'. There is a specific reason for this. If you are unable to comprehend, as seems to be the case with a few, do not worry - I will not call you dumb. But seeing the name spelt one way, right there in front of you, and STILL getting it wrong...well, that just begs a whack on the obviously malfuntioning cranium.
A neutron, at a basic physics level, is neutral. I am not. It sits in the centre of an atom and, for most practical purposes, does precisely fuck-all. I do not.
Now 'Neurotron', I would imagine, should not be too difficult to understand. 'Neuro-' refers to the brain, and '-tron' refers to machine. As in cyclotron, or animatron. Essentially, 'Neurotron' was meant to signify a 'brain-machine'. An entity that exits and survives by, and for, neural activity and stimulation. As we all are. Well, not all, by the looks of it.
I would have thought the blog description might have provided some clue. I even managed to put the title of Roger Waters' famous song 'Welcome to the Machine' in there. I guess I shouldn't have bothered.
So please...people I know/like can play with the name. Because I can at least imagine they understand the name. One does not, or at least should not, fuck around with something one does not understand. And remember what Mommy said - 'Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups'
Now, you wouldn't want me to call you 'assumption', would you?
Current Mood: Angry
Current Music: Scum of the earth - Rob Zombie
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