Being a lovely lass can be a real pain in the rhyming word.

This is Hedy Lamarr, not unjustly billed as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ in her time (she was also famed for her orgasm scenes). Fluttery eyelashes, perfect lips, and dreamy eyes on a brunette make for a particularly strong charm offensive.

However, that is not her most admirable bit, nor why she ought be a model to young women.

Said beauteous belle is the co-inventor of frequency hopping, which helped build torpedoes that are harder to detect or jam, and forms the basis of modern CDMA and WiFi technology. Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but they unkindly suggested she’d be more help to the cause by trying to raise money instead. She raised seven million dollars in a single event.

Lamarr was understandably pained at the media’s obsession with her bod and neglect of her more significant assets. She died in 2000, missing the 2003 Boeing commercial which pitched her scientific achievement and did not mention her acting at all. She’d've liked that.

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

- Hedy Lamarr

Unfortunately for us, that attitude is still around. Damn the media, girls. Brains are sexy.

'How It Works' - XKCD.

PS. ‘Hedy’ is short for ‘Hedwig’.

Look, hooters!

In what comes as an enormous relief to the many women named ‘Sarah’ across the world (including some 87% of all women in McGill), Sarah Palin has resigned as governor of Alaska. The New York Times reports that this will allow her to escape the constraints of her job, alternatively referred to as responsibilities willingly accepted as part of one’s office. She wants to effect change ‘outside the government’ which, I think all will agree, is an excellent place for her to be. For a moment there it seemed she meant ‘community organiser’, except everyone knows they don’t do anything. So it’s probably a literal meaning we’re grasping for here. If we can persuade NASA to take her on for that one-way shuttle to Mars, all the better. She needs some outside air, poor girl.

Being the governor of the largest state in the Union (thrice the size of France Freedom) must be terribly stifling. It isn’t quite life if you can’t hunt animals in all the other states as well. After all, one has bred prolifically. One must use the tribe for something. Ye defenceless beasts of the lower forty-eight, intelligently designed by a vengeful, short-tempered, white supremacist Lord God, look out. Here come the Palins armed with hockey sticks and semi-automatic assault weapons, led by First Dude flashing his dudely chest in a BP polo, followed by the brood. And here’s Mama Palin bringing up the rear, a little flag (with flashing lights … ooh!) buried through a hole in her cranium to prove her undying loyalty to Jesusland. Be afraid.

Russia, in contrast, can relax. It was becoming very difficult to scurry Soviet shock troops into America with Governor Palin watching them night and day from her tower in Juneau. Finally, the planned invasion of Alyaska can go forward. British Columbians are feeling a little less tainted by sheer geographical proximity. And Arabs, well, they hate America, so they must be celebrating too. We aren’t sure, but they worship a different god and speak funny, so that means they need to be bombed. And the Europeans. Them too. Baby-eating socialists.

Speculation is rife about what Palin wants to do, now that she has spared the Alaskan population the worse part of her tender loving care. It doesn’t stand to reason that she resigned to focus on a presidential campaign, because her term was going to end in 2010 anyway. Unless she can’t count. Oh wait, bring that reason back on the list. She might be planning to run for Commander-in-Chief of the United States, riding on her intellect, her charm, her sophistication (ok, sarcasm, now you’re totally on to me) and her record of fulfilling commitments for the whole term. You know, like when she was govern- yea, never mind. I can’t imagine a better candidate for keeping Iran in line. She might bomb them any time, just to see if the button works. Why, even Israel will sleep less soundly, because they aren’t quite sure Sarah Palin knows where Iran exactly is, or would care enough to aim right anyway.

One might venture to imagine that she is taking time off to write a book – she does already have a contract lined up, and Obama’s literary ponderings certainly paid rich political dividends. Oh no, that would require literacy, with elitist East Coast godless liberal habits like punctuation. Scratch that. A TV spot, perhaps one with Tina Fey. Such a sweet twin sister act it’ll be. I really hope it’s that. Saturday Night Live is in for some money. Now with Michael Jackson gone, the country has an entertainment void only someone as extraordinary as Palin can fill.

Since it would be utterly churlish to bid adieu (cross your fingers) to such a national treasure without extolling at least some of her virtues, let us find something positive about Palin. For one, she was honest about not supporting abortion at all costs. Which is exactly what she did regarding her own daughter. Truly, no child has been sacrificed so profitably on the altar of ambition since that whole mess with Isaac (who, if one’s Biblical knowledge is not entirely incorrect, was a child of a Sarah as well). Second, she has given Bush a legacy of looking committed (he certainly finished his whole term as governor of Texas) and erudite. Surely every President deserves this much, even one as challenged in syntax and enunciation. Taking one for the team, eh Sarah? Good for you! And third, she’s spared a small fraction of the American population her ‘leadership’. Who knows how (if!) she’ll come back, but for now, we’re rid of her. Is that a thin silver lining to a cumulus of intellectual, ethical, and emotional bankruptcy? You betcha!

‘I hate change.’

This from one of my most liberal friends, musing on the new(er) Facebook.

She who switched effortlessly from IE to Firefox and Opera, and even (gasp! the scandalous impropriety of it!) considered a white, Apple-stamped You-Know-What. Democracy, secularism, homosexuality and female suffrage combined have not drawn more outrage from cultural conservatives than has the new new Facebook from its users.

The French transition from monarchy through five republics had been a bloody and messy affair strung over centuries, but its violence pales in comparison to the Third Layout of Facebook. There are African countries where entire coups happen with less of an irked response from the citizenry.

And rightfully so. Facebook is trivial, and the changes made are even more so. It’s the trivial things that annoy one most. Clinton may well have brought eternal peace to Israel/Palestine and still been impeached for a minor transgression. Bush’s war was bad, but his grammar was soul-scorching. Couples who would forgive each other’s infidelity can divorce over toilet seats. Small things are big issues.

I, for one, welcome our new Facebook layout. Call it treason, call it blasphemy, call it typical cockiness, but I am, and this is why.

I have struggled with a Facebook addiction. Well, I wouldn’t exactly say ’struggled’, because that verb only applies when one actually puts up a resistance. Sure, I can limit myself to once or twice a day, but it’s still a temptation, and I have seen friends being drawn into Facebook’s insidious vagina dentata and never return whole again.

It is scary.

But that was when Facebook was a neat, cool, fairly useful site to return to. Since that is no longer the case, and one can not quite use this new format without feeling, erm, tainted, that is no more a fear.

Industrial alcohol is denatured by adding a small amount of the toxic chemical methanol to it, to prevent its consumption. I thank Facebook for ridding us of many, many social hangovers.

As an upstanding geek, I also hope that no company is so perfect that it cannot be beaten. I thought so of Apple, until the truth of their batteries dawned upon me. I feared Firefox would be that Lord of the Pings, until Chrome arrived. Google was genius, until iGoogle’s messy pages.

Facebook was my next fear. I thought Facebook could do no wrong, lead by a visionary management and a philosophy of minimalist graphics that would keep users in. I see I was much mistaken, and Facebook has finally taken the first suicidal steps towards being upended by some current unknown (or underdog). Like actresses far past their prime who cling on to long-gone fame with garish make-up and shock-value, Facebook is showing its senility. In the parlance of social networking, I believe this is called ‘doing a MySpace’. Twitter is too happy for 140 characters or less.

So you see? It isn’t so bad. Now we can all get off Facebook, and lead normal, happy lives. Every time you are tempted, just think back to what your homepage now looks like. You will find that resistance is far from futile.

For millennia, thinkers from Akbar the Great to Gandhi have wondered about the definition of India, and what it means to be Indian.

Is it about tolerance, the passive live-and-let-live philosophy that is the basis of our interpretation of secularism? Or is it joint families, a fondness for horoscopes, our many ways of cooking the potato, and handiness with computers?

Nah. The Sri Ram Sena, a radical Hindu outfit in the southern Indian state of Karnataka (of which Bangalore – bless it – is the capital) has discovered the answer to this most complex of queries. There answer is so simple, so short, and so absurd, that it is no longer to difficult believe that the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything Else really does equate to 42.

Women. Can’t. Drink.

See? Here you thought India was some kind of decadent occidental morass, guaranteeing equal rights to men and women, where all religions were treated equally, and people can do what they damn well please. No sir. India is the property of men, i.e., Hindu men, i.e., Hindu men with the idea that India is their property. So to prevent any further confusion, here is a list of what it means to be Indian:

Un, women imbibing alcohol is not Indian. Men imbibing alcohol is, because chauvinism is an excellent alcohol-digesting enzyme.

Dos, The health minister, Ambumani Ramadoss, has said India will not progress if we don’t stop drinking alcohol.

Of course. Look at the ale-swilling British, whose soppy island conquered and held our subcontinent for two hundred years. Look at the beer-chugging Americans, who in those two short centuries became masters of the planet. Look at the wine-sipping French, whose culture remains one of the most forceful in the world and who form the core of the EU. And the Germans who, lager in one hand and a slide-rule in the other, are the biggest economy in Europe. How indeed, with a glass of the strong water in our hands, will we ever be great?

Tres, Valentine’s Day is not Indian.

Really, I get this one. No one burns cards for Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day or Rakshabandhan (which, when you think about it, is just Siblings’ Day) because they’re Indian. It’s Indian to love your mum and dad and sister and brother – just not a significant other because hey, wives are supposed to be treated like doormats and husbands worshipped anyway, so what’s the point?

Before you ask, any notion of a romantic relationship before marriage is not Indian. Neither is one after. That’s just perverted. Our population is the result of extensive cloning, and the Kamasutra is the fault of time-travelling Muslims or Americans, pick one.

Valentine’s Day is a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture. Indian culture is defined as everything till right before the day in 200 AD when the Kamasutra was penned by that monotheist.

The world is divided into two countries. There’s India, where everyone knows his caste and dharma. And there’s the Rest of the World, comprising Britishers (all white people who ruled India), Americans (all other white people), Pakistanis (all Muslims everywhere, including our own), and the Chinese (anyone with flat-nosed and slitty-eyed, including our own).

This Rest of the World has been trying to destroy India from the beginning, sending Muslim armies, Britishers’ navies, and Chinese communists to overwhelm us. And when none of it worked, they invented Valentine’s Day as a last-ditch attempt to destroy India. It’s working. The country that assimilated everything from Alexander the Great to the French Empire is melting.

When Muslims in Afghanistan keep women indoors, barring them from living their lives and owning their persons, that is Talibanisation. What should we call it when Hindus do it in India?