A phrase is stuck in his head - "snow and ashes" - is damn stuck in his head. He doesn't know what is the cause or thought that brought fore these words. Was it quickly swallowing the first hundred pages of Kiran Desai's "An Inheritance of Loss" in a bookstore with its precise delination of exiles? Or was it meeting her - the blonde one whom he had perhaps coveted for a brief while years ago, just out of loneliness, given that they had nothing in common then other a few afternoons spent watching cheap movies - afterwards in the parking lot outside the bookstore, back in the country like a ghost, new husband in tow? Or is it this strangest of winters where sun shines bright hot all day and perhaps dreams of its absent snow and ashes? Repeating this phrase over and over again leads to the memory of an Early Music standard John Dowland's "Come Again". But what or whom does he want to come again? Snow and ashes?

Checking weather this morning, an AP story titled "Rapper finds inspiration in Chaucer" caught my eye on the Yahoo frontpage. The rapper in question, Baba Brinkman, morphs Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" from Old English into rap. While clearly you won't hear the stock rap words such as "bitches", "mofos", "pimpin my ride" etc in Brinkman's ryhmes, I really like what he has done with Chaucer's dark "The Pardoner's Tale". Check this shit out yo!

"Ready to kill with their jagged-edged daggers drawn The three aggravated braggarts staggered up the lawn And without dragging on while the story is told Beneath the tree they found a bag filled with glorious gold,"

IITians (I include myself in this group) are known to be geeks with social issues. While that may be true to a different degree from specimen to specimen, the following spoof of Omkara's "Beedi" song proves that for sly humor there is no other place like an "frusth" IITian's brain: