Seinfeld

Off late I been a watching some TV series at home after work. I don't have a television so I have to watch it on my computer. That means I can, and I have, for that matter, seen more than one episode at a stretch. For me the Pilot of an episode is the first five six episodes and then I decided whether I should continue watching that series. The Pilot in a TV series is the very first episode that is shot and air on TV or live audience, and then depending on public reaction, more episodes are shot and it becomes a TV series.

Few TV series that I have seen and liked are Prison Break, Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Allo Allo! and Friends. Then after all this sitcom avalanche after my work hours I saw Seilfeld. I also believe that I have seen a few episode before, but I have never realised how intelligently funny it was.

Seinfeld's 9 seasons have been aired on NBC from July 5, 1989, to May 14, 1998 with a 22 minute episode runtime. Seinfeld is a sitcom that was shot in New York. Created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Seinfeld revolves around the daily life of Jerry Seinfeld, a stand up comedian. He has George Costanza as one of his closest friend, Elaine, whom Jerry once dated and Jerry's next door neighbour, Cosmo Kramer, who almost live in Jerry's house, as the main charters. Additional support crew contains, Newman, the fat postman, Jerry's parents and Geroge's parents.

Jerry Seinfeld is a semi-fictional character played by Jerry Seinfeld himself. Jerry Seinfeld is a stand up comedian in the show and his real life. (The Character) He is a happy go lucky guy. He is a well established comedian who hardy have any problem getting a date or with money, hence no major issues as compared to his friend George Coztanza.

Goerge Costansa is played by Jason Alexander. George is Jerry's childhood friend. He is short, fat and bald. He dominated by his parents and finds it really hard to get a job and a girlfriend. He is loosely based on Larry David. The last name is however that of Jerry's close friend's Mike Costanza. George is a shown as a stupid and dim-witted person. He also referred himself as Lord of the Idiots, in one the episodes. His stupidity was apparent when, in of the the episodes, The Cafe, he has to take an IQ test and he ask Elaine to take it for him.

Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is Jerry's good friend and his ex-girlfriend. Elaine is generally smart atleast smarter than George. She is a serial dater and she hates smokers. Elaine is quite a loud character who gets angry very easily and quite dilettantish. She wears her usual casual cloths and formals at work. She has worked various steady jobs mostly as writer or editor.

Cosmo Kramer or simply Kramer is played by Michael Anthony Richards. Kramer is a real character. Kramer is Jerry's next door neighbour, although he eats and is mostly seen in Jerry's apartment. The character like George Costanza is slackly based on a real life character, Kenny Kramer, who lived across the hall from Larry David. Cosmo Kramer is not working anywhere but never had problem with money and usually stays in the building. He likes smoking Cigar and playing Golf. His high, curly and wavy hair and his outmoded wardrobe are important parts of his personality. He speaks very loudly and kinda sounds like Al Pacino. He always has crazy ideas, like throwing his furniture away and get steps in his apartment. He is a very honest and tactless person. Kramer has also at times surprised the audience with his uncanny knowledge about various things such as Miss America pageant and his ideas of coffee table book.

Seinfeld over all is a very smartly written and beautifully characterized series. The jokes are very intelligent. The episodes starts and ends with Jerry on stage doing stand up related the episode. The best past is still the end credit music played on bass guitar.

I really like stand up comedians. I wish I can be a successful stand up one day. But the job is really tough. The reason why most of us like stand up comedians is because they are able to crack jokes about themselves, their loved ones, their origin or their community. Cracking jokes is quite a tough task, but cracking jokes on yourself in front of live audience is really tough. But the tougher the task, the better it pays. If you ever feel not being able to cope up with the declining number of acquittance, try cracking jokes on yourself, that might make you feel embarrassed but you will find a lot of people liking you.

Out of Office replies

Here are a bunch of Out of office email replies you can you next time.


1: I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood.



2: I'm not really out of the office.I'm just ignoring you.



3: You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office .If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.



4: Sorry to have missed you but I am at the doctors having my brain removed so that,I may be promoted to management.



5: I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from vacation on 4/18.Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.



6: Thank you for your email.Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.



7: The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message.Please restart your computer and try sending again.'(The beauty of this is that when you return,you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over).



8: Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queueing system.You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.



9: Please reply to this e-mail so I will know that you got this message.I am on holiday. Your e-mail has been deleted.



10: Hi. I'm thinking about what you've just sent me.Please wait by your PC for my response.



11: Hi! I'm busy negotiating the salary for my new job. Don't bother to leave me any messages.



12: I've run away to join a different circus.



AND, FINALLY, THIS ONE TAKES THE CAKE :



13: I will be out of the office for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons.When I return, please refer to me as 'Loretta' instead of 'Steve'.

The Legend of Tony!!!

Frank Anthony was born on 19th February 1948 in Birmingham, England. A son of Italian immigrant family, Frank started playing guitar when he was a teenager. As money didn't flow easily for an immigrant family, Frank had to work in a sheet metal factory as a teenager. He also had a night job playing guitar in a pub band.

One day, when he was 17 years old, Frank came home early from factory as he decided to quit his job there and devote more time to his guitar practice. His mother didn’t like it. She asked him to go back and at least complete the shift. Frank went back. Tiered and de-motivated with the sheet cutting factory, he accidently let the cutting blade run through his figure and the tip of his middle and ring fingers of his right hand got chopped off. He was a lefty, but a lefty has to press the guitar strings to the fret board with right hand. Frank was devastated. He couldn’t see it possible, so he quit playing guitar. He had to, fingers don’t grow back. They are gone if they are gone.

Frank’s manager in the factory was aware of Frank’s night job and his enthusiasm for playing guitar. The manager gave Frank a gift. A record of Django Reinhardt. Django Reinhardt was a European Jazz artist who also lost two of his figures in a fire accident and still was able to play guitar. Reinhardt became an inspiration for Frank. He picked up guitar again. Frank strung his guitars with extra-light strings (using banjo strings, which were a lighter gauge than even the lightest guitar-strings of the time) and wore plastic covers over the two damaged fingers. He fashioned the latter himself, by melting plastic liquid-soap bottles into a ball and then using a soldering iron to make holes into this ball, putting his fingers in while the plastic was still soft enough to be shaped. He then trimmed and sanded away the excess plastic to leave him with two thimbles, which he then covered with leather, to provide better grip on the strings. Subsequent he got custom-made tips.

Frank Anthony or Frank Anthony Iommi is better known as Tony Iommi. Tony Iommi is considered as one of the greatest guitarist of all time. Tony was the guitarist of Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull. While playing for Black Sabbath, Iommi detuned his guitar from E to C# (3 half-steps down), in order to ease the tension on his fingers. As a result, Sabbath was among the first bands to detune and resulted in the technique being a mainstay of heavy metal music. The first two Black Sabbath albums are actually in E tuning, however, as Iommi didn't start tuning down to C# until 1971's Master of Reality. According to Allmusic, "Iommi is one of only two guitarists (the other being Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page) who can take full credit for pioneering the mammoth riffs of heavy metal." In 2003, Iommi was ranked 86th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and, in 2004, number one on Guitar World's "100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time".

Tony wouldn’t have probably been able to come up with power chords (these chords are considered as base of heavy metal music) had he not lost his fingers. His weakness became his strength. Had Tony not picked up his guitar, the head banging world would have been deprived of the monstrosity of Paranoid and NIB or may be even heavy metal.

I love You Man

I asked a friend of mine to suggest me a movie to watch, something I can watch at home. The first movie he suggested, Scent of a Woman (Al Pacino), seen, then he said I love you man. I though he meant to he really like me for not missing an Al Pacino movie and then he said Role Models. It all of a sudden occurred to me that when he said "I love you man" he was suggesting a movie. Next day I tried to tell a female friend the title of the movie "I Love You Man is a good movie, must watch", she got scared for a minute, really? scared? Well, that's what she said.

This movie is about a guy Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) who is having a good life, with good job and a girl friend. He propose her and later realises that he has never had a good male friend all his life, the one who can be a best man at his wedding. So his family tries to fix him up with some guys who can be his friends and they all turn up to be quite a disaster only for him to eventually meet Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), you must recall him for the TV series 'How I met your mother' (Marshal Eriksen) . Peter and Sydney hit off really well and happens to become really good friends without anyone having them set up.

Paul Rudd and Jason Segel also appeared together in a movie before this, Knocked up (one of my favourite movie) . I Love You Man is a very light movie, just like Knocked Up. No heavy drama or emotion, not a kind of movie where every thing will go wrong with a guy and all of a sudden by the end of the everything will falls in to place. A normal person can relate more to such movies than those heavy packed drama or thriller movies. Unless you actually think you are Spiderman or Batman everytime you walk out of a moive hall. I Love You Man wont leave an everlasting impression on your minds but nevertheless, its a movie you can really enjoy.

I feel lucky to have never ran out of friends. That's a perk you enjoy if you have lived in a hostel during your school or college. But it also made me thing of another thing, the perfectly knitted web of incidences that defines whom we are with. The series of events that connects us with people we know. We really cant set people to meet intentionally. They will meet if they have to. All our intelligence and smartness can be nothing if it is not meant to be. You can call it a plan of nature or destiny or whatever. It is inevitable and it works like a clockwork.

Whisky in the Jar - O

As I was going over
The Kork and Kerry mountains
I saw Captain Farrell
And his money he was counting
I first produced my pistol
And then produced my rapier
I said "Stand and deliver
Or the devil he may take you"

I took all of his money
And it was a pretty penny
I took all of his money and
I brought it home to Molly
She swore that she'd love me
No Never would she leave me
But the devil take that woman
For you know she treat me easy

Mush a ring dum a doo dum a da
Whack for my daddy'o
Whack for my daddy'o, there's
Whisky in the jar, o

(Lyrics are not complete)

As made famous by Thin Lizzy and later covered by Metallica in its Album Garage Inc. (more to discover on this album)

Whisky in the Jar is a famous Irish traditional song. I suppose like 'Jugni' is in Punjab, although I am not quite sure whether thats a good comparison. The song is about a Traveller (As I was going over The Kork and Kerry mountains), who robs a Military person to be later betrayed by a woman (Molly) he loved and ends up in jail.

There are many versions of this song where in the name of the mountain (Kork and Kerry) is different. Other names used in different versions, Kilmoganny, Gilgarra mountains are all after places in Ireland. Even the name of the girl Molly, is different in different versions.

This song was Thin Lizzy's first big hit. This song also earned Metallica a Grammy for the Best Hard Rock Performance in 2000. The Thin Lizzy Version is very soft and smooth like a smooth Whisky, and the Metallica version is a hard rock version some what like the aftermath of excessive smooth Whisky. The song, however, was hit before Thin Lizzy. It was made famous when an Irish folk band, The Dubliners, performed and recorded it.

It a beautiful song and shouts my name over and over again.

First Post

Hi People

This is my second attempt to write a Blog. The first one failed miserably when I was in college due to lack of interest, enthusiasm and most importantly, lack of content. I hope this time around I will have some little bit of enthusiasm while I work on this Blog. Following this post, I will try to tell you my view points on various topics including Music, Movies, GMAT, may be computers (I am a computer engineer) and other topics that relate to my work and the stuff people are up to.

Lets Roll