Gaurav Vaidya's blog

I'm not afraid anymore. I am just wondering how much of these last 21 years will fit in 2 suitcases.

I think we mistake sadness for depression, because life is basically sad, and its the failure to recognize that that leads to this sort of resentment and bewilderment [...] It is, it is, and [..] you know, people just suddenly think that the world owes it to them to be happy, and they're not happy and then they think well, why aren't I happy, and makes 'em angry and then they're depressed about the fact that they're angry and they're bitter about the fact that they're depressed, and this downward cycle; why don't they just accept that life is sad and cheer up, it's not forever.

I'm dead tired (but, clearly, not exhausted) after Software Freedom Day Singapore 2009 (which I will blog about at my leisure, unfortunately for you), but I really do want to keep up my blogging rate - I'm still averaging a post a day since I started this whole better-blog-regular-like thing on Monday, and it seems a shame to give that up - especially with all the help Remember The Milk is giving me in this area! - so I figure I'll bring you some funnies.

I love comedy with a passion unequalled by any of my other interests (and if you have any idea how many "interests" I have, this will have astounded you). I enjoy a lovely belly laugh as much as the next person, basically rely on the BBC's Friday Night Comedy podcast to get my through overlong days and stressful times, and read webcomics I like with vengences. I'll dissect comedy to get at the bones of the thing, with meat still hanging loosely on. I'll revere people I consider to be comedy geniuses, such as Messrs Milligan, Hamilton and Hardy, as well as brilliant comedic performers, including Peter "Bluebottle" Sellers, Mark "Mr. Cul-de-sac" Steel, Jon "Brian Perkins and The Doctor" Culshaw, Fred "It's Fred" MacAulay and the entire cast of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue and The Now Show. And what an uncomfortably long list that is already. Check them out on Wikipedia - or even better, YouTube. They really are incredibly brilliant.

Reminiscing (to say nothing of mass Wikipedia-ing) aside, here's the links I really wanted to share on this blog post: some of the funniest gags I've seen on the interwebs recently.

• I'm Not Entirely Sure He Knows What That Is by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• Tangled Webs And So Forth by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• Parable of the Good Samaritan, as read by Police Constable Seargent by Spike Milligan.
• The Unhorse by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• And Here's Gabe With The Weather by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins.
• The Mark Steel Lectures: Oliver Cromwell by Mark Steel and team.
• A clip from A Dog's Life by Charlie Chaplin, also starring Sydney Chaplin and a dog. Movie details available at IMDb.
• The Mark Steel Lectures: Charlie Chaplin by Mark Steel and team.

Well, that took longer than I thought, but my list of things-to-blog-about is now a whole lot smaller. Hooray, etc! I'll see you tomorrow.

I recently stumbled upon a brilliant website called The Diary of Samuel Pepys. In case you're not familiar with the gentleman I refer to in the title of this post, he was a naval administrator and MP in his time who rubbed shoulders with Newton (him of gravity and mechanics), was an early president of the Royal Society, but remains best known for the detailed diary he maintained for nine years from 1660 to 1669 (he was also played by Neddie Seagoon in a Goon Show episode entitled The Flea, but that's quite another thing entirely).

I'm fascinated by the potential historical significance of blogs - I don't suppose I'll ever be famous, but it'll be fantastic to tell my family, "Hey, want to know what I was doing from 2003 to 2009? It's all on the Internet!". How cool is that? That's a lot of writing from a fast-growing-much-grousing part of my life, so it'll be quite interesting to myself eventually, sitting somewhere in the twilight of my years looking back on myself (I reflect so much I feel like a opposing pair of mirrors sometimes). Reading my old blog posts is already a pleasure I indulge occasionally. My Twitter feed is also accumulating the nail-clipper-droppings of my daily life - nothing of any use to me now, or even in the near future, but wouldn't it be awesome to look back on my life in, say, October 2009, with the kind of almost creepy near-hourly perspective that Twitter allows for? And remember how much I enjoyed just being able to find a double-decker bus to or from work?

Samuel Pepys is, to my mind, that principle stretched to its ultimate conclusion. He was a skilled writer and journalist, and was in the centre of the tumult of his times - if you'd been reading blog since September, you'd have read his wonderful description of his experience of the Great Fire of London, 1666. The blog is true-to-date, too: entries are put up exactly 343 years after they occured. Too busy to follow the complete journal? Snippets of his life are of course available on Mr. Pepys' Twitter feed.

Another reason this website dazzles and astounds me is how well this potentially bland, text-only information is organized. I haven't had a chance to read the encyclopedic articles (I only believe in one encyclopedia, anyway), but the in-text annotations, the Also on this day summaries of local weather conditions and other journals, and fantastically cross-referenced names (such as Mr. Thomas Hayter) really bring the text to life. My current unformed impression of information science is that it consists entirely of people sitting around figuring out the best way of presenting, say, a large amount of text-only content, in a way that would be fun to look at and work with, attractive to new readers, and clean and useful to existing readers. Information like this deserves to be made available in a form like this website, which does justice to what I like to think (romantically, I know) would have been a goal of its writer.

Doing something like that for a living would be completely awesome.

The best webcomics are well-drawn and interesting. The greatest webcomics are emotional and meaningful. The very best webcomics somehow manage to draw you into the lives of (physically) two-dimension characters and breath so much life into them, you can feel your gut wrenching in sympathy with these illusionary fragments you meet three times a week. This page from The Order of the Stick is about all the evidence I need that Rich Burlew is insanely talented, and that OotS is pretty much the high-water-mark of what online webcomics can accomplish.

So the thing on my mind this evening are the allegedly racist attacks in Melbourne last weekend. Let's leave the issue of racism out for a bit: four people were badly beaten up quite badly in a public car park in Epping, VIC, just about three quarters of an hour from downtown Melbourne. As near as anybody knows (and that might not be a lot; compare the link above with this version of events; there's a lot more clear information to come out of this thing), this attack was entirely unprovoked, and money does not seem to have been a motive. If you - or, more to the point, me - were there, there would have been nothing we could have done to stop the attack but tried to find what cover we could and hope for the best.

The whole violence-in-Australia thing is a lot easier to deal with when you look at the broader and the closer perspective. A good example is from that last link:

Simon Overland wrote that "Victoria Police has been concerned about the rise in assaults and robberies involving Indian students",[30][31] and said that "racism was clearly a factor in some of the attacks."[32] New South Wales Police said that Indians are not over represented in Australian crime statistics.[33] Sydney-based United India Association president Dr Prabhat Sinha takes the view that the attacks are not necessarily racially motivated. He said: "They become soft targets by groups of four to six drug users, for example, who just want cash."[34]

So, yes, sure, race is a factor, but as long as you stay away from the "bad parts" of town, keep your eyes open for suspicious groups of people, and make sure you are in significant groups, you should be fine, right? Maybe not, and that's the bit that scares me.

It's really not as bleak as I paint it, though. According to ABC news, the people who would later be "seriously assaulted" were verbally abused in the bar, at which point the abuser was thrown out. And check out this story from Epping, Essex: how safe can you be when people jump you and beat you for possibly no reason? (Oh hey, while we're on the subject of assault without any clear reason at all ...)

There is such a thing as inadequate law and order enforcement; but then again there's plain old-fashioned "being at the wrong place at the wrong time". I think I'm going to chalk this up as an example of the latter, but don't think you're off the hook, Australia. If these kinds of incidents continue, there will be fewer foreign students heading off to study in Australia, and I might end up one of those staying away.