Blighty Bound

Yes, I'm London bound for all of 2 1/2 days - landing Tuesday morning, flying out Thursday evening. I'd barely have time to look Kartik up!

I'm not going to bother about getting over jetlag. I'll just be a bit sluggish in the morning, till about 1pm, and then prod buttock.

Update: This is so unfair. The day I travel is the day we get some snow. Bloody winter. I wanted to enjoy snow, not get trapped by it!

YAGW

Yup, it was Yet Another Great Weekend.

Friday: I cooked a meal! Yes! Me! Cooking! And buying wine glasses and wine! And cheese and crackers! The frou-frou-ification of the Axeman has begun! But it was a great time with The Lady, so it's all good.

Saturday: The Lady treated me to brunch at the B B King Blues Bar & Grill, specifically to a Beatles Brunch. The brunch itself was very so-so, but the music really did make up for it. Four Americans - apparently stars of the "hit" Broadway musical Beatlemania - dress up like the Fab Four and sing their songs, with a few non-Beatles songs thrown in. The only one I could recognize was Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven, and if I'm not mistaken The Beatles did a cover (either sung live, or recorded, I'm not sure). The show was split into two acts - representing the pre-Revolver

  and post-Revolver

  days.

Now, the Gods know how much I love The Beatles. But I have two dirty little secrets muddying those clear waters ... one I'd admitted to earlier. The other is ... (drum roll) ... I don't like most of the stuff that came out post-Rubber Soul. I like the raw energy of the rock 'n' roll days ... the psychedelic stuff is all well and good, but it's waaay too mellow.

After the brunch, we headed over to Union Square, for what appears to be an annual bizarre funfest, the Pillow Fight. Essentially a bunch of people (mostly NYU students, I'll warrant) hitting each other

with pillows until they burst

... at which point, everyone's covered gentle, feathery snowflakes

that get everywhere. Honestly, I'm still picking out little bits of down out of my scarf & jacket!

Sunday: Not so great. I was working for half the day ... watched the Oscars at night. A quiet day.

But all-in-all another great weekend of new experiences in this crazy city. :-)

My Picks

Well, the last year's been a bit better than the preceding year, in that I've watched a few more of the nominated pictures. Even so, my "picks" are more like "guesses". Here goes ...

Best Picture: The Departed

Best Director: Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, Babel

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen

Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet

Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Best Cinematography: The Illusionist

A couple of people have asked me if I plan to blog the Oscars again this year. Unfortunately, it was more of an experiment last year ... and I ended up concentrating more on my laptop than watching the show ... a strange experience, to be sure. Somewhat like missing the joy of a moment because you're too busy looking at it through a camera viewfinder. And so this year, I plan to fully enjoy the show, with my back to the PC!

Public Service Announcement

From this year onwards, Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US will now be marked on different dates.

DST starts (clocks will be moved forward 1 hour) 2nd Saturday of March - this year, March 11th
DST ends (clocks will be moved back 1 hour) 1st Saturday of November - this year, November 4th

Apple has just released several patches to OS X to accommodate these changes ... I'm not sure if Microsoft has followed suit yet.

Daaaaaaamn!

I really like some the apps on my iMac. The last couple of days, I've been fooling around with GarageBand, the music creation software.

I haven't really spent too much time drilling down every command, function, loop and mix, but I put this mp3

together in 15 minutes, using the program's built-in guitar, bass, and drum "loops".

Groovy cool, eh? :-)