On The Ning Nang Nong

Movie: Not One Less

"How much does it cost to travel to the city and bring back Zhang Huike, the dropout?", Wei asked a class full of eager to help kids.

Wei is a 13-year old girl who agrees to work as a substitute teacher. So, she travels to a provincial and dilapidated room that serves as a school to a ragtag of village children. She complies to work for a month and get paid on the last day under the condition that she retains all her students. "Not one less" child in the class. Then, she would be paid fifty yuan. The film is funny and smart and endearing. I don't know how they make children to act in natural expressions. Enjoyed the film. It is from the same wuxia director Zhang Yimou who made films like House of Flying Daggers. I liked this social film more.

 

The Village: By George Crabbe

I was talking to a friend yesterday and telling him that I would retire to a monastery and not a village because villages are sham as they are not as idyllic as pictured in movies. Then I remembered this poem. I tried hard to recollect where I came across this poem. Some essay, then it struck me that I read this reference in a Guardian book review. I cannot recollect the review though. I loved the last stanza. It's grim and earthy and stirring -- "To think a poor man's bones should lie unblessed." Since then I always quote this stanza when anyone talks of romanticised haystacks and verdant pastures. There are declining swains and pains also! Full poem: here.


The village children now their games suspend,
To see the bier that bears their ancient friend:
For he was one in all their idle sport,
And like a monarch ruled their little court;
The pliant bow he formed, the flying ball,
The bat, the wicket, were his labours all;
Him now they follow to his grave, and stand
Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand;
While bending low, their eager eyes explore
The mingled relics of the parish poor.
The bell tolls late, the moping owl flies round,
Fear marks the flight and magnifies the sound;
The busy priest, detained by weightier care,
Defers his duty till the day of prayer;
And, waiting long, the crowd retire distressed,
To think a poor man's bones should lie unblessed.

 

Reflections On Inner Voice

"The problem with you is that you can talk on any topic, any length of time, topics you don't know, topics you know, both equally you will wring away with your curiosity and excitement but you have to understand that every one is not chatty like you. You can talk. I can listen. You talk. You just talk. I will listen."

"Is it a men and women thing like women can blabber so much."

"No, it is a women and Ira thing, women talk, Ira talks more."

"But everyone can talk. Right?"

"No, not really, you talk so much. Don't misunderstand. In a good way, you are capable of talking so much nonsense and non-stop and non-tired and you can swing and bisect and slaughter and hybridize topics !!!"

"What the heck is even that last hybridize?"

"In the same line you can confuse mannerism with astronomy with chinese water margin. You won't care a damn and fuse away things like it is your peremptory to administer winding nonsense into utterly depraved nonsense"

"Are you crediting me or condemning me".

"No, I amused by you so much ...for the de Staël-Holstein in your voice. You can talk ! Damn! You can talk like hell cares."

"OK, I get it. Hell, Hades and I can talk."

 

The Lambeth Walk of Little Skate

I was going through the Smithsonian backlogged feed. There's new research on male hormonal contraceptive by targeting alpha transporter to impair motility of sperm cells with ouabain (African tribes use it to poison their arrows), second stage rocket in Falcon Heavy messy or massy (note: all the media spotlight is on first stage rocket), rotation crop technique of strawberries and broccoli (broccoli, the anti-fungal is a natural fumigant compared to chemical methyl bromide), chronotherapies around lithium and light for mood disorders, breeding of broad-faced dogs like pugs and bulldogs and the misshaping of their genetics (also: heightened broad-faced, pups, caesarean), the phantom Learjet that flew for four hours with dead crew in 1999 before crashing in South Dakota, Nixon on why women should not swear, and other sciency and wondrous stuff.

But the one article that deserves a Ning is the skidding walk of undersea skate. The walking skate is challenging science to revisit how ambulatory locomotion developed from undulatory locomotion in animals. Long before the amphibians crawled out onto land, the sea creatures were walking some 420 million years ago with their anterior pelvic fins. Don't believe, watch the video and the evolutionary biology of those walking skates. I found it interesting.

 

Figure Skating: Are quads a hard limit?

Continued with a variant skate. Figure skating! When Olympic Sports are reduced to a science fair, I have mixed feelings. We have the athletes and a legion of researchers trying to grasp the unravelling science and maths behind that graceful figure skating jumps through high-speed cameras.

Not going into the details of moment of inertia (MoI) and angular momentum (AM), figure skating is the balance of both these properties. Reduce the MoI and increase the AM. But how? And is there a hard limit to such configuration?

We have so far achieved quadruple jumps with the incredible Miki Ando, the humming bird of figure skating. Would a combination of science and sport elevate that to a quint with game-changing body contortion and arm wrapping to achieve the impossible in human feat. And I thought the only science in Winter Olympics was that parabolic mirror to light the customary Olympic Torch with sun's rays in honour of sun god Apollo instead of a match stick. So, are quad jumps a hard limit to physical torsion? Do we foresee a revolutionary Fosbury Flop of figure skating? More here.

 

Capiche?

Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the brain” is the archetypal short story for crisp evocation. In few words, he articulates monumental verbal stride. A prickly customer, a bank robbery, a brief altercation, and a bullet. But when you read the story you will understand why his writing and this story in particular has become the byword for short story telling. Tell it like Tobias!

However, unlike genre telling, literary stories confound me. I grope for a gratifying closure. OK, I usually get the end. But, in this story, I could never get the end. Even in that concise story, to further shrink, two paragraphs are of significance leading up to his lapsed death. Full story here.

Anders burst our laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, " Capiche - oh, God, capiche," and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.

[...]

It is worth noting what Ambers did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him. Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate's name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect. Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born.

This is what he remembered.Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle's cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they've chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play. "Shortstop," the boy says. "Short's the best position they is." Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

Why did Anders recall that awry grammar "they is" when the masked robber said "capiche". Is there any soft link between these incidents? Was he an errant stickler for finer details that is unobvious to the reader? Did Anders spot something in that "capiche" which made him laugh and beckon his gruesome death by a bullet. I didn't capiche the story as I was unable to tie back his bleeding observation on the robber to his last recalled memory in a baseball field. Or, was it simply that our strongest memories are not the most memorable but the most mundane.

 

Succès de scandale

There’s scandal and then success (like Padmaavat) or success and then scandal (like viral wink). One follows the other. While watching a Marcel Duchamp documentary, came across the word,

Succès de scandale (French for "success from scandal") is a term for any artistic work whose success is attributed, in whole or in part, to public controversy surrounding the work. In some cases the controversy causes audiences to seek out the work for its titillating content, while in others it simply heightens public curiosity. This concept is echoed by the phrase, "there is no such thing as bad publicity".

Good phrase for a resonating phenomenon.

 

Omnium gatherum: Words that struck me this week

Last night I was talking to a friend and resorted to vague fire and brim ...there ...there (a word escaped my tongue), there were bombs and detonation in the border. But there was some word to denote military fire ...may be artillery. It still escapes me! However the other delightful words from the week are below.

Cop out: I copped out from using this word. Shirk and skive are common. I rarely use cop-out.

Uncomely: Few years ago I came across the word "comely" used very nicely in "Rules of Engagement" sitcom. I liked the antonym uncomely. But I never use it. Why? Don't know. A chance meet with the word again this week brought it to the fore.

Jakos to bedzie: For a change, the word is not German but Polish to mean "things will work out in the end". Great insight in a puny phrase.

Chop shop: I came across this word in La La Land movie last year."Hey, what is this a chop shop?" Then the word was backgrounded. This week while reading an article when I saw the word I stumped. Such a nice word.

Logjam: Not loggerheads or deadlock or traffic jam, but "logjam" -- a situation that seems irresolvable.

Farouche is shy and froideur is carefree and fourchette in the glove. Beautiful words! But unpretentious to an untutored ear. Be careful. Is Salman Khan a beefcake?

 

First line of the first episode

Link Guess the TV Show by the First Line of the First Episode

I scored 17/22. Damn! I didn't know Friends opening line.