s! the outlaw torn

another lazy weekend.. no plans as such.. all plans have been kept for next week when vip rents a car for his driving test – shopping for the house, returning the empties, going to the mall and wal-mart, camping in letchworth park and wine-tasting in the finger lakes ) woke up in the morning on saturday to watch premier league soccer.. then promptly went back to bed.. went to aldi’s for food shopping. our weekly food restocking jaunts are quite fun, especially when we go to aldi. we usually already know what we need, and aldi is the kind of place that doesn’t give you too much selection.. so our trips are more like viking raids.. smash and grab, loot and pillage.. then we pay at the counter, and share the spoils of war.. then we carry our respective huge loads back home, thank god its only a 5-10 minute walk (depending on how much we’re carrying, and how high we are!!)

saturday was a warm day, kinda cloudy, but nice and warm.. we dared to venture out again in tshirts to play cricket.. the backyard looked beautiful, with the leaves fallen everywhere.

we got high in the evening and creative too.. vip and arul made mashed potato cutlets (aloo tikki) which were awesome, with chana masala and bread. then, perfectly sated, we watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 which nats had brought. i must encourage you all to go the site.. it’s an amazing interactive experience!

hung out on the front porch checking out everyone walking past in their halloween costumes and stuff.. main street was crowded like crazy.. and it was damn windy too. we wanted to go on a walking expedition in the middle of the night, but then the combination of us being extremely high and it being extremely windy didn’t really appeal too much.. ) had some more milkshakes at night with nats and sank, and then watched Blair Witch Project.. but dozed off not too long into it.

finally a sunday to be thankful for in buffalo.. and not because of the weather either. the Buffalo Bills won! they steamrolled the Arizona Cardinals 38-14, with some excellent plays.. terence mcgee returning a kick for 87 yards.. willis mcgahee rushing 100+ yards for two TDs.. brian moorman punting repeatedly into the 20 mph wind to get excellent field position.. all round defensive excellence.. all in all, an early Thanksiving gift to us long-suffering buffalonians!

the day actually worked out perfectly.. work was fine, a bit hectic.. there was no chance i would make it to the seminar and stay alive, so i came home and got my head down and added three more hours to the sleep total! went to class after that, and was treated to dr. baier in some poor form again, boring us to near-death.. his classes just aren’t the same anymore.. *sigh* must be the impending winter.

smoked up and left for the concert.. missed Seven Day Faith.. bad luck i guess, but caught The Music, who actually impressed us quite a bit. dan had come along with us, and was quite put off by the name.. but we had to admit that they played good stuff. their vocalist looked like he grew up studying robert plant videos.. he had the hair, the look, the clothes, the accent and the patented screams down too.. and the british-based quartet had one helluva drummer too.. he could definitely walk into a lot of bigger bands if this project doesn’t work out for him!

Incubus came on with a lot of hype.. and they lived it up in their opening few minutes.. brandon boyd has a very different vocal style that very few have, or can match.. and they were one of the first rock bands to use a turntable for effects (something that Nine Inch Nails started, and Linkin Park have taken to a new level!).. the lead guitarist had a semi-circular zoom pad with some 5 zoom units on it!! they played all their favourites, and their hyperactive drummer sprinkled in drum fillers everywhere, while boyd himself was carrying a bongo around to pelt! in fact for a percussion jugalbandhi.. the bassist exchanged his guitar for another drumkit, and the three then had a rollicking time! all in all incubus did not disappoint, and i was very happy with them, except that they didn’t play ’11 a.m.’, which is one of my fave incubus songs.

went over to 87M.. they had a bonfire going in the slight drizzle, and it was really cool to smoke up and eat dinner outside, getting slightly wet and yet warm at the same time! it was like a bonanza for all the senses as they put the laptop and speakers out on the window sill.. they’d got the four-tubed pot from the dealer.. and that was an amazing experience too.. four of us in a circle, doing hurricane rounds..

around 3ish, vip n’ i went on an expedition to the nearest gas station.. to get smokes, and milk, and twinkies, and whipped cream, and a hershey’s bar!! the contents of our nightly shopping ‘trips’ (literally!!) always tend to be like this! we woke arul up for some entertainment.. the house was really quiet and eerie before that when we came home. suddenly we wanted to drink milkshakes.. so i took out the blender, and for the next half an hour proceeded with great caution in making three tall ones.. great caution because hand-eye coordinations were nowhere near their best! watched some more junk tv.. iron chef, documentaries, cartoons, before calling it quits around 5. i remember chatting on IM with a couple of pesky people who kept asking me things, and typing was such a pain then.. i don’t even remember who i was talking to.. hmmm..

yeah so life’s taken a busy turn again.. which is good.. i prefer my days to be full.. doesn’t give you time to ruminate then on how dreary life is, and what we should be doing instead, yada yada yada.. y’know how it goes! we’d gone to watch ‘The Village’ in north campus last night.. which was okay, nothing great. the story seemed very strongly based on the Amish lifestyle.. though i must say i really liked the cinematography and background score. the red capes of those ‘who should not be named’, the red berries and flowers and the mustard yellow of the ‘protected ones’ stood out very starkly against a sometimes severe monochromatic setting.

got home to find no food prepared.. damn! so nats, sank, vip and arul got to work on that, while i got to work on the engineering marvel seen in the previous post! we raided vip’s lab for the pipes, fittings and other assorted odds and ends. nats and sank baked a cake too, that sadly did not live to see the light of day, perishing almost instantaneously in the dark night!!

took the ‘Red Devil’ to 87M for yet another live test run.. sid had made some great chicken.. awesome finger-lickin’ good stuff.. then like the sultans we are.. we reclined with our hookah, and had some grapes – yes, this is the life!

and now it’s friday morning 8.18 am, and here i am at work.. bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, and still-stoned, with a full day ahead again.. work till 12.. then a seminar on microfluidics from 1-3, then there’s biomaterials class from 4-6.. after which is the UB Fall Fest! Seven Day Faith are opening for Incubus.. so that should be awesome, and after which we’re having a bonfire at 87M.. it’s gonna be a long, fun day!

yup, you read right! we have raised the bar again! the hookah has been modified, and we stylised our ‘genie in the bottle’©™!! the newer version is called ‘devil in the bottle’©™!! the picture below will tell you why!!

it was tested, and came back once again top of its category! now two people can sit and smoke up as comfortably as they want!

as the title so succinctly puts it, we have set the new benchmark in home-made smoking devices. ‘genie in the bottle’©™ is the newest and definitely best addition to our product repertoire. we first tried it with a smaller gatorade bottle, saw that it worked, then comrade pierre smirnoff beckoned, and after a bit of engineering, ‘genie in a bottle’©™ was born!

what else remains to say but that was the one of the most amazing, sense-satisfying, comfortable smoking experiences ever! we took it over to 87M for product testing, and again it scored the best reviews in its category. even T was impressed, and that is saying a lot!

one navi mumbai ka comfortably numb chemical engineer with a masters in environmental engineering and an educationally challenged kenyan iit-kgpian with biomaterials and mechanical engineering basics have got together in the cold wasteland that is buffalo to form what will go down in pot history as two of the most creative minds to ever work on the smoking experience!! the venture shall be called Brownie Corp.®, watch out for us on the Nasdaq soon enough! there you go, having shed the cloak of anonymity, we are now going public with our creations. the bar shall continuously be raised, as on the path of life, we seek the most ultimate smoking experience. walk, no, fly with us, and let us make the world a better place for you! ) you just gotta smoke it to believe it!!

*waiting for applause to die down* once again, thank you, and please direct your technical and purchase enquiries to the comments section in this blog. also, here’s a sneak peek into the next level we’re moving to – one word, ‘vaporiser’!!

holy crap, this week seems interminably long! when does it all end? when did it all begin? woke up at 12, and immediately knew it was a bad idea. the day only got progressively worse. Cell Surface Bio from 2.30 to 5 was one of the longest ordeals i’ve ever been through.. firstly dr. baier rehashed a lot of grade IX bio, then showed a couple of absolutely dreary videos, and topped it all off with an increasingly boring lecture on surface cleaning.. yaaawn! it was so warm in the class.. virtually impossible to keep my eyes open.. i think i went brain-dead.. no wait! that already happened a few years ago, sorry!

we’d planned to go watch ‘The Village’ at school at 9.. but by the time i finished cooking and had a couple of drinks, i was too whacked to leave my couch. we’ll probably make it tomorrow.

this girl in class (sheryl?) was writing her diary during the half-time break today. that was really nice, cos not only was it a beautiful red diary, with a gold embroidered sleeve.. but also cos no one has a diary anymore! by the way, keeping a diary doesn’t include blogging.. these mindless rehashes of daily narratives and random rambles in intellectual wonderland are not it. i was very impressed.

the eight hour shift was quite a long haul.. time just stopped after around five or six hours.. and sitting at the circulation desk became a mission! thank god kim came in at eleven. shelving also wasn’t too hectic either, phew!

came home at four.. fried up some eggs, tossed in some bacon, put it all on toast, wolfed it down and hit the sack! nothing quite like an evening nap, after a full day’s work, and a good meal over it. though the flip side is i’m gonna be up almost all night now.. i must say it’s good to be working again; i’d best be getting used to what working all day feels like.

was watching ‘Rock Star’ in the evening.. both mark wahlberg and jennifer aniston did a good job in it, though the music left a lot to be desired. for a heavy metal band, the music was quite low-key! that movie reminded me a lot of Iron Maiden! now that’s the kind of music that should have been on the soundtrack! check out the website, and every one of their 23 albums! yes, you read that right, 23!!

sank had gone to the public library yesterday, picked up a couple of westerns. i must say i thought i had lost the ability to read! or rather, read something that is not printed on glossy, colour pages, does not come on a monthly subscription and is not adorned with lingerie models, semi-naked women, electronic gadgets and semi-naked lingerie models, business plans, or newsmakers! hah! )

what a hopeless day monday is! especially at this time of the year, when fall is definitely over, and winter hasn’t really kicked in as yet. got up around 11.. sank was ill so he didn’t go in to work either. soon enough vip woke up and arul was back from school, so it was the boys at home on monday morning.. we made fried chicken for lunch, and then played cricket all afternoon.. then had that biomaterials class at 4.30.

i got probably what must be the least deserved ‘A’ in project abstract writing history!! then again, going by how i wrote it , no one should really be surprised either! the class itself was pretty interesting. we were discussing how there is legislation in place for registration of automobiles, but nothing similar for internal implants.. just by sheer volume you would think it would be so much easier! but then there you go, governments and insurance companies step in and make the waters even murkier. but you can imagine how much easier it would be for medical services if, say, an american man with a pacemaker goes to australia, and has a coronary; all the medics will have to do is pull out his driver’s license, where he’d have his pacemaker number. they’d run it on the central database, pull out his complete implant history and other relevant complications etc, and go ahead and treat him. it does appear all this is some 10 years away still though.

was working from 6-8, then nats had called us over for a pasta dinner, which was as good as usual. had some 3 shots of rum and was great after that. you all remember the sea shanty from Robert Lewis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ i hope:

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

Drink and the devil be done for the rest

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum..”

dropped by 87M cos the new stock was in.. and it was good stock too! went to T’s place too. now T is this good, cute, ‘butter won’t melt in his mouth’ looking kid.. but he’s a good and proper pothead too.. and has some very quirky habits about smoking up.. but we don’t give him too much grief. it’s so much easier to take KT’s case! even snoop jumps in then! and shashi i wont even start with. he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, but he seems to have been charged with the divine duty of wrecking KT’s thought processes and trips. he’s really gonna get hit one day when he oversteps!!

came back home, and did some more of the medicinal shots.. i gotta say, the initial response we’ve been getting for our ‘flu shot’ has been awesome. there may really be a market for this! after that we woke arul.. and made shrimp masala, with sri lankan tea.. and i really wanna show you guys those pics here, but i’m posting this from work in the library, and i dont have the photos uploaded yet. as for work, don’t even ask! it’s 8 something right now.. and i’m on till 4.. and i slept at 4.. and my co-worker’s not in either.. *sigh* it’s gonna be a long haul..

saturday dawned nice and bright – we decided it shouldn’t be wasted, so we went off to play soccer and football. then came back home to watch the UB Bulls succumb to yet another heavy hammering, despite playing half-decently. i think it will take at least another five years before the program acquires some depth and resilience. until then it will take some infinite patience to support the boys.

the night turned into another pizza and alcohol fuelled night.. watching junk tv for most part. we’re out of stock, and decided to stay clean for some time.. give the cells some time for growth and regeneration. besides, am still waiting for my paycheck, the bank account also needs a shot in the arm!

sunday was kinda warm.. the Buffalo Bills were kinda cold.. and they got whupped by the Baltimore Ravens – so what’s new. i got severely drunk and pissed off watching those idiots.. am seriously considering switching fulltime to the Philadelphia Eagles.

as part of the week leading up to Halloween, there were loads of horror movies on tv.. we watched The Omen trilogy until 2 in the night.. and shook everyone’s faith too while we were at it! there was a great documentary on Discovery about different types of volcanoes in northern america.. and the amazing brutal power they wield over us!