I just hit the Google news tab, and learnt that Steve Irwin, the one man who makes me switch the channel to Animal Planet on the rare occasions I watch TV, has died in a freak accident with a sting ray. Here is a YouTube Video in which he is hamming it up. RIP Stevo. :(

Because typing in this little square is cheaper than talking to a shrink. The first fall night, half a moon in a clear sky. The blue of dusk, the loveliest time of a day as well as the most intensely lonely time - someone should come home but he never does. And longing for something beyond evanescence. People dining al fresco, the sound of cutlery and talk to where she sits cradling her cup of coffee. Music revolving in her head, a soundtrack to minor jealousy that she feels at these domestic scenes of comfort; one song in particular that plays in a movie scene, in which a sick man walks out of an office feeling forsaken; she always wept at that scene even when caught that movie in passing in a maternity clinic; and then there was that beautiful story he had written set in that city; of a little girl and a lonely man's love for that little girl; he called her a little girl, and even though she was cross with him first, she found missing that the most when he left; he said he didn't fit; what did he mean by that? Was it pride? Was it the jealousy that he confessed to, right at the beginning, which he said he felt towards her cosmopolitan background? They met on an airplane, a turbo prop kind, with packed seats, one of those connecting flights flying a short leg between two hubs; he was a slight man with large sensuous smiling lips given to observing details; as someone trying to make her way through the world as a photographer she liked that, liked his first email to her reminding how fascinating he had found her thumb ring of jade, and her square wrist watch. She remembered his kindness in helping her to get to the proper gate for her redeye flight to California in an airport that was jammed because of a heavy evening thunderstorm; memory of that thunderstorm in every thunderstorm since. Tears too last night at the opera with her parents, her father liked his enthusiasm for music even though he had no musical training unlike her five years of piano lessons...

(to be continued)

One of the great pleasures of reading the Great Bong is the way he can take these wacky leaps across cultural references. Consider the adjective he concocted to describe Shakira's hips: Yudhistirian. He quipped:

"I said [”Please Shakira. Please just shake your Yudhistirian hips (since her hips “don’t lie”) Colombian style and do not bother to do Indian dance steps. Cause even with Farah Khan doing the choreography, your desi dance number sucked at the MTV Music Video Awards.” ]"

Priceless! Here is that dance* in question** as well a really funny paradoy (called "La Gordura" or "The Obesity") of the sexual hokum that Shakira peddles in "La Tortura" ("The Torture").

*Please see Sharanya's (a danseuse herself) critique of this nonsense as well. Farah Khan gets some hard love!