God Bless America!

Sometime in the last fortnight, Kofi Annan makes an emergency call to President Bush, as the situation in Lebanon was getting too much out of hand. This was the coversation which happened, as caught by the secret microphones placed in the UN office by foreign spies.

It is 2 AM in the morning when Kofi Annan makes the call.

Kofi: President Bush, Sorry for disturbing you at this unearthly hour. I hope you were not with your interns.

Bush: Its ok Kofi. I was in fact with my interns. I was spending time with them in turns. So, what makes you call at this hour ?

Kofi: I am sure you would have been informed of the volatile situation in the middle east now. I wanted to discuss with you about the Middle East Peace Process.

Bush: Ah, good that you brought this up. So, now you want me to get involved ?

Kofi: Yeah.

Bush: Great, I have always wanted to be involved in this Middle East Piece Process. I shall ensure that the Middle East is broken up into Pieces and America gets all their oil and nuclear warheads.

Kofi: No, No Bush. You misunderstood. I am talking about the Middle East Peace Process, not the Piece Process.

Bush: Don't worry Kofi. Go and have some coffee. I shall take care of everything. Today morning, I am planning to meet Rice to have some rice for breakfast. I shall explain everything to her and we shall start with the Middle East Piece process.

Kofi: Bush, wait ! That is not what i meant. I ...

Bush:

Bush: ok, whose the next in turn?

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Everyone knows that FOX news has infiltrated the White house like no other agency has and that no word spoken within the white house is out of their reach. Like all other conversations, this one too was overheard by one of FOX news' contacts within the white house, who promptly relayed the same to his superiors at the studio.

So, the top of the hour news, the next morning was ..."War on terror" (What else does FOX news show). Analysts on the show were discussing how Iran and Syria were using peas to create weapons of mass destruction and that Bush, along with Rice, was travelling to that region to oversee the Middle East Peas process! The show even had its journalists visiting the town of Peasville in Northern Dakota to meet experts on the peas process.

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At the end of the day, Kofi was seen discussing his peace plan, while the americans were busy bombings the middle east into pieces and Jay Leno appeared on the late night show, cracking jokes about how Bush likes to have Rice for breakfast!

Ah ! Americans. God Bless America.

Normalcy after dumb-c

Things are returning back to normal after one week of hectic activity for the dumb-c event. It was so hectic that I missed posting the crossword solutions for few days on my crossword section. The dumb-c event (Check out the invitation poster for this event here) went on well with the winner winning the final by the narrowest of possible margins of 1 second. Due to the unusually large number of teams participating, we had to have three preliminary rounds, followed by two semi-finals and then the final. I tried to have different rounds for the various levels, with some of them proving to be popular and some, a little difficult to handle.

Some of the rounds i had are:

- Mirror round: A person mimes and the second person only acts as a mirror of the first, just repeating the first person's action. The third person (the guesser) could only see the second person(mirror). This was fun because it required coordination to avoid a lag in the miming between the first person and the mirror

- Normal dum-dum-c with a movie name. A person mimes it to a second person who in turn has to mime it to the third who guesses. All the movie names i used in this event were fictional ones, as i didn't want the teams who watched more english movies to have an advantage. It was tough to come up with almost 50 fictional movies names considering the fact that i had to ensure at least a similar level of difficulty for the movies used in the same round.

- Sitting around a table - The three members of the team sat at different places in the room. Each of them was given a word and within the time specified, each had to get the words of the other two. No one could speak out the word. So, there had to be co-ordinated miming so that all three could share their words with each other. The scoring was a little complicated, but effective. For each word the team didn't get, +10 was added to their score. If a team got all the six words (1 each from the other two), then whatever time was left out of the total time allocated was subtracted from their existing score.

- rapidfire - Each team got a list of 10 words and within the time stipulated, they had to get as many as possible. The scoring pattern was similar to the one in the "sitting around a table" round.

- dum-dum-dum-dum-c - This was a little complicated to explain to the teams, but they managed to understand, somehow ! The three team members X, Y and Z get a word each, say A, B and C respectively. X mimes A to y (Z is turning the other way). Then Y mimes A and B to Z. Now Z knows all the three words A, B and C. Now, Z goes to X and mimes B and C. So, now X knows all three words. Then X again goes to Y and mimes C. So, at the end , all three should know all three words!

- Blindfold round - I was skeptical about this round, but it went on very well. The mimer was blindfolded and the guessers couldn't speak. But, the guessers were allowed to give feedback by tapping on the table/floor eg: One tap for "yes" and two taps for "no" etc. The teams were given one word to mime and all the teams managed to crack this round.

- Miming to both - The mimer was given a movie and he had to mime it simultaneously to both this team members. Both the guessers couldn't speak out and they couldn't see each other too. So, this meant that both the guessers should be good in understanding the miming.

The scores of all rounds were normalised to 60 seconds to avoid the case wherein, a team does well in a 60 second round, whereas fails in the 180 second round and loses out because of the bigger margin. So, when you normalise the scores, all the rounds are equally important.

Finally, the finals finished yesterday and so i guess i can go back to my normal routine!

If you want to browse the entire list of movies and words i used (segregated according to the rounds), go to the dumbcharades page.

The Second Google Earth Quiz

The landmarks below are as seen through Google Earth. The questions for the individual pictures are alongside the pictures. This was posted on Quiznet, Qfi and few other quizzing groups, but the pictures are posted here to avoid huge email size. Click on the images to open a bigger picture. Scroll down for the answers.

1) Identify this beach. Zoom into the pic for clues

2) Identify the city in which this airport is located. If you look at the current picture of this airport, it might look totally different.

3) Identify this landmark.

4) Identify the city in which this street is.

5) Identify this stadium.

6) Identify this landmark.

7) Identify this bridge.

8) Identify this landmark.

9) What is this a part of ?

10) What was here before ?.

The answers. Highlight between the words ANS for the answer.

1) Identify this beach. Zoom into the pic for clues.
ANSAlang Beach, Gujarat, India. This is the famous ship breaking area , where ships are broken down and sold as scrap.ANS

2) Identify the city in which this airport is located. If you look at the current picture of this airport, it might look totally different.
ANSCould be identified from the context of the question. Beirut Airport, LebanonANS

3) Identify this landmark.
ANSBurj-Al-Arab, Dubai. The 7-star hotel in the shape of a ship's mastANS

4) Identify the city in which this street is.
ANSSan Francisco. This is called the crooked street and supposedly the crookedest street in the world. Driving on this street is easy, but the approach is tough.
This road goes down from the top of a hill and the approach road up is very steep and often congested because of tourist traffic and u have to be a better-than-average driver to leave a traffic signal smoothly when your car is on a steep slope!ANS

5) Identify this stadium
ANSEden Gardens, CalcuttaANS

6) Identify this landmark.
ANSGateway of India, MumbaiANS

7) Identify this bridge
ANSHoogly Bridge, Calcutta. The colour of the river is the same in questions 5 and 7 :-)ANS

8) Identify this landmark.
ANSStatue of LibertyANS

9) What is this a part of ?
ANSPalm Jumeirah, Dubai. Palm tree shaped island resortsANS

10) What was here before ?
ANSWorld Trade CenterANS

Thanks to all those who attempted the quiz.

Dancing Matt

Matt quit his job so that he could go around the world and dance on every continent. He has been to some really amazing places, as can be seen in the video. His dancing skills are even more amazing, very consistent across the various continents. I hope that I will be able to see at least few of the places he has been to.

Photographing the moon or the art of Mooning

The definition of "mooning" according to a wikipedia entry is

"The act of displaying one's bare buttocks by lowering the back side of one's trousers and underpants". But, do you need a tutorial to do that ?

This article will talk about a different mooning, that of photographing the moon.This article will be the first one to appear in the section "Photography tips and tricks". So, who needs to read this tutorial?

If your best shot of the moon looks like the first image on the right, you definitely need to. Most probably, many first timers' shot of the moon would look the same. Read the article on "Photographing the moon" to transform your shots to look like the second image.

Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi

If you are a supporter of Zidane and felt that Materazzi deserved to be head-butted, here is a chance to show your anger, just headbutt your way through Materazzi.

Dumb Charades (dumbc) event at Amdocs

We have a Dumb-C event coming up, which I am going to organise. This is the invitation poster i prepared for the event. Got the monkey image through a google image search for "Three monkeys", then cut out the one with the hands on the mouth.

The Hindu Crossword Solutions

To force myself to keep trying the Hindu Crossword on a daily basis, I have started a Hindu Crossword Blog, where I am posting my daily attempts. I started this a few days back and I can see a significant improvement in the number of clues I am able to crack :-).

Back in college, I have even managed to crack the entire grid on a few occassions! Pretty soon, I shall start posting clues for others to solve too.

The Google Earth Quiz

All you have to do is to identify the landmarks shown below, as seen through Google Earth. This was posted on Quiznet, Qfi and few other quizzing groups, but the pictures are posted here to avoid huge email size. Click on the images to open a bigger picture.

1)
2)

3)

4)

5)
6)

7)

11) There is something different/unique about the t-shirt the girl is wearing. What ?

Answers:

1) Arc De triumph, Paris

2) Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

3) Niagra Falls

4) Parliament Building , Delhi

5) Petronas Tower (Can be identified easily from the shadow)

6) Opera House, Sydney

7) Taj Mahal

11) The Tshirt spells Love when viewed in a mirror.

Thanks to all those who attempted the quiz.