Pay It Forward Sami !

The world doesn’t owe us Gay Happiness. While it took pronouncements from a
certain smart alec on a blog I most admire, asking me in short order to fuck off,
the revelation itself is still to sink in. Have to say, it was a light bulb moment for me. No, not the gay happiness part but that anyone should take my
online rantings that seriously – enough to make them want to expend their precious ATPs in vitriol.

Here’s some eye candy I picked over the weekend that makes me feel carbonated all over :
What say guys - how would you like to find out, if in fact, we boil at the same degree ?

"HE"

"This, I will remember
when the rest of life
is through:
The finest thing
I've ever done
is simply
loving you."
- Robert Sexton
(my thoughts exactly)

I needed to say all the things I feel and not feel all the things I ought to say.
Everything that needed to be said is said.
I am glad I finally got him off my chest so that all's well that ends swell.

Find him smegmalicious, no? Yeah, you're darn right - smegmalicious very.

Flavour of the Season

Whoa! Are we there yet?! It’s a miracle I am still mentally all there, weeks after scouring the back alleys of the old quarter of town in a manner not much different from Jack the Ripper - only I was looking for incense, myrrh, lanterns, fire-crackers and colours. You get the idea. I don’t generally like particularizing about my likes or my dislikes (yeah right, :) and yet I will say this : the festival I like best of all (by a long shot) has got to be the festival of lights, of colours, of food and drink ; of boardroom and bedroom excesses, and above all the festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil. A bit clichéd
now don’t you think? Anyway, that’s Diwali for you and that’s how we like it.


Diwali is as much a festival for grown-ups as it is for the kiddies where you are allowed to eat, drink and gamble away to glory. Suffice it to say fundamentally, it rests on the premise of Karma and karmic existence – if you’ve been good earlier then you can afford being a little naughty for this time of year. Imagine, there’s even a romantic spin to it where wives get to bathe their partners lock stock and barrel without the usual killjoy suspects we find in morality police so much as batting an eyelid, all in the name of traditional sanction (well, maybe, I’ve made up some of it along the way but not all of it).

So friends, foes and lovers wherever you may be, here’s wishing you all a Happy Diwali and a Prosperous New Year. Have a nice one!

I leave you with images of Diwali for your sensory pleasure

Only For Men

If looks could kill




Some Like It Horny, as they say. And no, I don't find saying this particularly corny.





Good things always come in small packets...nah,well, not quite but almost.


Now that's putting a red blooded "sangre azul" spin on packet size




Night, knight - my Luv!


My Bad

From the Edge of Reason

Getting told off for being too slow on the uptake is now part of the wallpaper for me. My BMI is grossly skewed - my waistline being slightly more elliptical than a rotund ellipse and yet when someone takes the piss out of my BMI I don’t hurt as much as when they pull me up for being dense in the head. On any given day why are we sensitized more to put-downs involving our intellectual attributes than our physical ones? Why does it bother me less when the office smart alec farts out “ bitter belly” to my face at the water coolers, than say, my super who has no qualms about laying it thick on me in an office meeting : "Are you even capable of thinking? Cannot you understand this is a brain-storming session we are in? How will you ever learn to ideate?"

Mind it I do have a thumb on certain complex mental tasks requiring some degree of data sorting and analysis. But give me a simple physical task to do – anything like tying my nephew’s shoe laces or assembling a piece of furniture, and I will have it messed up royally for sure.

Next stop – the runway, no not the fashion kind. The airport runway. I have been to hell and back trying to crack this one. Why do airlines insist the window shutters be kept open for night time take-offs and landings? Why must they keep banging on about it till the camels come home?

Language over numbers : Folks who are numbers retarded seem to draw less flak than say, those for whom language and communication has always seemed daunting (parce-que……??) There oughtn't be double standards operating here. Why the pecking order in "the three Rs"?

No blog post can ever seem complete without a refrain on racism. In recent years, racism has changed its tone, texture and color from what was once, "black and white racism" of the Martin Luther King days to "technicolor racism" in this day and age of Obama and Osama. Even so, advertising agencies in the Indias are willing to bend over backwards to hiring Caucasian models for marketing products they are hoping to sell to mostly brown skinned people. Apparently, their perception is “the brownies” have never had it so good – so they can now partake of the good life the whites have been having and doing all along. Is that the message they are dishing out? Either that, or advertising gurus are merely sculpting their "blink and you didn't notice fantasies" out on Caucasian and Latino models whom given half a chance, they'd very much like to run away with, dumping wives and the other baggage at home. Anyway, let's just call it the " Ginny & Jonny" effect and be done.

Finally to end on a rather sombre note : what’s the best tack to follow in a road rage situation? The blog rage gurus on the Net are divisive on this. While some maintain a direct confrontational approach involving getting out of the car to tackle the situation at hand others think it appropriate to stay put in the car. Not the one to incubate blog rage ever in matters both personal and the not so personal, if you think you could help me muffle the white noise from gray matter here, do drop me a line at ofcouscousandzugzug@gmail.com

Kinsey - THE FILM

Reviewing films is just not my kind of thing. As such, my short and long term memory is so short term I can hardly recollect anything I’ve watched and have liked enough to make me want to critique that film in a blog. But there’s the one film I am prepared to make an exception for : Kinsey. At a mixed gender and I am presuming, it was a mixed sexuality gathering also for a private screening of “Kinsey”; the film completely knocked everybody's boxers and knickers off . Nothing I have experienced since the Schindler’s List has stirred my marrow in much the same way as has this film. Its message is priceless though if you ask me, the film is now well beyond its sell by date at the box office. Here was, I thought, a film with ideas fresh from the farm for a people and society rummaging fresh out of ideas for entertainment and intellectual debate. Kinsey was able to tap into my feelings and thought processes that at some level, I felt was finally my life on reel and talk about reality on reel becoming surreal. Reading thus far, you’ve probably guessed, I am just not cued-in to the film reviewing process. Yep, you are spot on : my treatment of Kinsey has nothing of the formulaic appraisal of the screen play and cinematography of which I understand zilch. But it’s the message stupid! Even my not so homophile film partner whom I went to watch the film with had this to say : “To each his own. At least, the film is not preachy.” And I think that’s exactly the point the film maker was trying to make – live and let live. What I liked best about this film is how it challenges sterotypes ( I always like it when that happens) and the way it shows us how bigoted we, as a post-modern people are, when it comes to experimenting with the other side of our sexual identity. Both straight and the not so straight people could stop pigeon-holing themselves and others into one or the other category of sexual orientation. You may be a 90-10 straight and I may be a 20-80 straight but that, does not of itself, translate into a “and never the twain shall meet " phenomenon. Watching the film I admit, I must have, for the first time in my grown up adult life felt a need to cover the ground a bit more and explore getting in a relationship with the opposite sex at some stage of the proceedings. Coming out the cinema, we all of us, felt at a vantage point to see the lie of our sexual orientation and mental wiring more clearly; one which would allow us to go places we wouldn’t otherwise have dared to go.The one thing I can assure you this film Kinsey is NOT, is it's kinky.

A big thumbs up to Kinsey then from me (and my alter ego) for allowing us differently inclined individuals a peekaboo into the dire straits of straights and the not so straight. To many hard core traditionalists out there this film will merely be like water off a duck's back but for the receptive and the open minded "Kinsey" will feel like a life transforming experience. It should be made compulsory viewing as part of sex education and sexuality training classes in high school and colleges, under a UNESCO/WHO initiative.

I give it my 7 Stars.

This and that OR This or That ?

Wealth or Wisdom

Longevity or a short intense life

H2O or O2

Truffles or dates

Josh Lucas or Patrick Dempsey

Audrey Hepburn or Madhubala

St.Lucia or Amalfi

Cocktails or Mocktails

Cancer or HIV/AIDS

Italian men or French women

Scones or Canapes

Pink Champagne or Chilean Red

Clean shaven or stubbled

Gay or trans gender

Kiarostomi or Majid al Majidi

Martin Amis or Susan Sontag

Margaret Attwood or Ian McEwan

Filipinas or English nannies

Iran Air or KLM (a no-brainer this but will stay regardless). I deliberately put this in for a "shock and awe" effect

Sea bass or Red snapper or Sole

Hemming & hawing or umming & erring

Singleton confinements or Twin (two for the price of one)

Condom or the pill

Soho of London or SoHo New York

Vietnam or the Iraq war

Chanel no.5 or Nina Ricci

Osho or the Art of Good Living

Day job or shift work (obviously, not as obvious as it sounds)

Harrods or Bergdorf Goodman

Hyde Park or Central Park

Bold & the Beautiful or Young & the Restless

Boston Review or The Atlantic

Oprah or Tyra

Viagra or Kundalini Yoga

Niagara or Victoria

Sarkozy or Tea cozy (hint : think biting cold Parisian winters)

Bruni or Liani

Sugar daddies or toy boys

Boyfriends or bfs

Digital or analogue

Valor, velour or lycra

Darn!! Choices. Their remit is to enrich our lives not make them more complex than they already are. Blog away your choices and the winner who gets the most matching choices to my own is guaranteed fast-track dual citizenship of the Islamic Republic of Iran & Afghanistan. So hurry now, this is the last and final call.