Further idle nomenclatural speculation: Dracula edition

When people think about Dracula, they don't think about how shitty it is for him, looking down or up at the world today.

Consider this: your father, named Vlad II, has been inducted into the Order of the Dragon for his various heroic, very Christian campaigns against the Ottomans. This has led him to take on Dracul as his family name. Dracul currently means 'devil' in Romanian, but back then it corresponded more with Dragon. As his son, you're named after him, Vlad again, and simply known as Dracula i.e. son of the Dragon. This restricts you. It restricts your identity. You want to step out of your father's shadow, like your other (legitimate) siblings: Mircea II, Radu the Beautiful, and Vlad the Monk. Unfortunately, you lack a distinct name like Mircea. You apparently do not qualify for an epithet involving beauty, or any other of your inherent qualities. And you've just inherited the throne from your father, so you can't even use an occupation like Monk to set you apart.
What do you do?
You mull things over as you absent-mindedly assign various Ottomans -or one of the many other aggressors surrounding your part of Romania (Wallachia, you call it)- to be impaled on a stake. You quite like having people impaled. It calms you. Feels natural.
You hit on an idea!
Confucius said that if you have do something you love, it'll never feel like work. You probably haven't heard of Confucius, but it occurs to you that in impaling people, you have something that you love to do. Why not be well known for doing what you love? People already talk about your proclivity for impaling. Why not turn it up to eleven? If it works, you have your own identity. If it doesn't, you you got to impale thousands of people anyway! It's win-win for everyone involved.
Thus, you set doggedly upon your path, and your determination bears fruit! You will now be remembered as Vlad Tepes, The Impaler. You have cast off your former name wherein you dwelled, confined. You die in comparative mental peace, knowing that you have made your own name and reputation as a man who killed thousands, and that is how you will be remembered.
Until more than 400 years later, some Irishman writes a book about bloodsucking creatures and garlic that's a horror story that plays on societal fears of foreigners and their seduction of British women, replete with revolting children as all literature of the time must have, and exciting horse and boat chase scenes, and quotes like "Phonetic spelling had again misled me." and plasters YOUR name as the title of the damn thing, with you as the bloodsucking undead monster.
You don't mind this quite so much. You don't mind the slander that you made a deal with the devil and dealt in black magic. You don't mind the implication that you live off the lifeblood of others, and kidnap babies for your many wives to consume. You actually quite like the bits involving you seducing several women, and having the strength of many men.
But what you simply cannot ABIDE, is that now you will be forever remembered as Dracula.
After you went through ALL THAT TROUBLE to get rid of the name, to get a new name for yourself.

On behalf of the world, I would like to apologise to you, Vlad Tepes. You shall always be The Impaler in our hearts, if not through them.




(PPPS: As a final apology to poky little Vlad, even on the website of Wallachian rulers, by his name, there is a little note saying that he is NOT Transylvanian, that Transylvania is North of the Carpathians. He is Wallachian, for god's sake! Damnit Bram Stoker you Irish bastard. You do research into middle European mythology and oral tradition, but you can't get the main character's damn country right?)

The grass is never green/ Or, little grievances of everyday life, the first of many

I have, at home, a miracle of modern technology.

At its heart lies a hollow cylinder, of toughest steel;

Its outer casing is made of stern plastic,

Refined from plants and creatures

Several millennia dead;

It is connected to the wall

Wherefrom springs energy intangible

And a near endless flood of water;

And yet this marvel has seals of rubber

So as not to electrocute the humble organic user

Who interacts with its electronic interface.

This is truly a marvel of modernity.

Yes, I speak of the magnificent washing machine.

It withstands the onslaught of water, electricity,

Jarring motion and corrosive soap,

All the while bearing a load

Of upto 7.5 kgs in my case.

It allows for nigh on a thousand variations

In speed of revolution (that kindred spirit of the french people),

In temperature of the water,

In the manner of motion

Whose agitation evicts unworthy filth

From one’s modest vestments.

Thousands of years of scientific progress,

Thousands of hours of collecting resources

And assembling them in order

To produce this intelligent machine.

This is no doubt the pinnacle of human innovation.

Which forces me to ask the question,

Why can’t the bastard tell me that it’s overweight,

BEFORE flooding itself with water

That will soon spread across the floor of the apartment

On the evening just before the landlord brings his date home?

What's in a name?

Over the years I've received several comments on the name of my blog. They can all be summed up as a kind of Freudian giggle at the mental image of Nandan's Pillars. "LOL phallic imagery attached (is it odd that attached has only two t's in it? I feel like it should have one before the 'ch'. Is this just me? AM I ALONE IN THE WORLD?) to your name LOL"

Well, now is as good a time as any to address this issue.

Just what do you know about pillars?

"Wikipedia has one article lumping together pillars and columns so looking there for a conventional definition is clearly a lost cause. But open this in a new tab and read it after you've finished reading this blogpost." 

Around the time of the ancient greeks, there were 3 types of pillars:

The Doric:

"How did you manage to lose all that weight, Phyllis?" "Oh, stop it.
Truth be told, I can hardly bear a propylon, much less a parthenon"

The Ionic:

And here we see the inspiration for thousands of bad hairstyles and worse wigs

And finally, The Corinthian:

"I'll just pick the first thing that turns up on google images. What could go wrong?"

(Anyone who is shocked is advised to pick up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Sandman)

Thus, we have established that pillars are objects used to prop things up, usually roofs and buildings. Those, however, are simply literal and useful pillars. We must consider figurative and useless pillars as well.

Kabbalah, Sikhism, and the EU are all based on 3 pillars. Not the same ones, one hopes.

4 pillars form the basis of a separatist movement in Moldova.

That blessing to us all, Wikipedia, enshrines 5 pillars as the editorial principles, so closely and religiously followed by 1% of people who edit Wikipedia pages.

Of course, everyone has heard of "Seven Pilars of Wisdom," T.E. Lawrence(of Arabia)'s autobiographical work, concerning his experiences during the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks, with the aid of seven enlightened women of Hispanic origin.

Moving on.

One of the odder, more memorable pillars around is the Pillar of Salt. Its origins lie in a somewhat confusing Biblical story regarding, that most common feature of said book, sin and depravity.
Sodom was a most sinful city, and all the inhabitants depraved deviants, too busy being sacrilegious to even give the thumb to The Lawd. This understandably left The Lawd feeling somewhat miffed, and with a mind to rain consequence down upon the blasphemers. At this point, Avi lobbied His Lawdiness in favour of Sodom, and long story short, failed, as there weren't enough decent folk living there to merit mercy for the majority. Just to make sure, The Lawd sent two angelic auditors to Sodom, where they ended up staying at the house of Lot, Avi's nephew, at Lot's invitation. Somehow, the rest of Sodom heard about the newcomers and showed up at Lot's door, desiring to get to know the guests in the biblical sense. Lot, being an excellent host and a better human being, not only refused to give up his guests, but offered the assembled rabble his two virgin daughters, them what have not known man, to do with as they please. The filthy, (implied) homosexuals rejected Lot's offer, and brayed further for the guests. The guests then revealed themselves as angels and blinded the Lot, sorry, the lot of them.
Having thus acquired proof that everyone in Sodom was worthy of being smote with fire and brimstone, barring Lot and his family, they instructed Lot and his family to hoof it asap to avoid destruction. They also warned them (or just Lot; who said debate is only present in the scientific community) NOT to look back while running away. The reasons for this are kinda vague but whatevs what's a good story without vagueness/plotholes.
So. As Lot and his lot are scurrying off, Lot's wife disregards the angel's order, and turns to look back (emotional state unknown) upon Sodom. BOOM! She gets turned into a pillar of salt!
Yeah, weren't expecting THAT plot twist, were you?
There's a LOT (heh) of debate about why exactly she was turned into a pillar of salt. Was she looking back out of longing and was thus punished? Or was the sight of The Lawd trampling the out the wrathful vintage of fire and brimstone upon Sodom simply too much for her human body to handle? No one's sure. What we do know is that because she is now a pillar of salt, Lot and his daughters ended up having to incestify things up.
In his book of nonfic writings, Fates Worse Than Death, Kurt Vonnegut has a lot to say on why he wishes he were Lot's wife. It's a lovely essay, and you should definitely read it, and the rest of the book.

For those of you waiting to hear exactly why I picked this name for my blog, go back and read the little bit under the title of my blog.
Satisfied? I should hope not. It must've been positively irksome to read through all these somewhat related wordchunks and end up being told that the answer was there, beneath your nose, the whole time. Now you know how all the protagonists feel in stories with THOSE kind of lessons.

For more vaguely self-aware ramblings feel free to comment or contact me in any manner as long as it isn't too particularly homicidal. Say it with flowers, tolerable. Say it with other species' corpses, I'd really rather not, unless otherwise specified.

Blood in the Old West is Crying Right Now

For some unfathomable reason, Bleeding Cowboys has become extremely popular. Barely a week goes by without it popping up on some vast billboard or ad reels on the pointless TVs in restaurants.


For those of you concerned with matters much less pointless who are wondering what I'm on about, which would be everyone, I'd think, Bleeding Cowboys is a ridiculously overstylised and hyperdecorative font. Aside from the sin of having such an awful name, it looks ridiculous and can be described, most generously, as mainstream indie. It is not in good taste. It is the visual equivalent of the taste of licking out the dumpster of extremely rich people, except with less class. It is the optical version of the foul smell of bad hospital smell air freshener which doesn't completely drown out the smell of urine. It is a lazy writer's dried sweat.


As you can probably tell, I am not very fond of Bleeding Cowboys. I hold what some might describe as irrationally strong views against it. Read it yourself; be the judge:

You can tell from this that this font is not intended for usage in sentences. It is highly unlikely that it is used even for one entire sentence by anyone apart from people who are busy exploring frontiers of OohFunkyFontLand.


Thus, experimentation aside, it's most common usage would be in single lines, like titles in movie posters or very very very bad books.


What led me to this rant is the apparently sudden discovery of this font by various hindi films.
At least 3 have come out recently that use it in their main poster. 2 using it for the title. It rankles me, nay, it infuriates me, to see this staring out at me from the vast posters above theatres and billboards ranging round the city and buses going infuriatingly by.


The culprits I noticed:

There are about 5 more variants of this poster, and ALL of them are rank with Bleeding Cowboys. Much like the Alamo.

While these are, in fact two different films, I counted them as one considering Raktabeej is a complete ripoff that is trying to profit by releasing at the same time as Rakhtbeej. Or vice versa. Point is, all their posters are riddled with Bleeding Cowboys, and as an added bonus it seems like my favourite celebrity Rakhi Sawant is doing an item number for one of them. Though I prefer her when she talks, rather than dances.

To be fair to Yeh Khula Aasmaan, this is the only poster which uses Bleeding Cowboys, and it is used for only one word out of the many written. That said, who on earth thought it was a good idea to have the word SUCCESS in this awful font? Clearly whoever was making the poster was trying to include as many fonts as possible. I just think that even Times New Roman would be better used here. But apart from SUCCESS, this poster seems mostly nice. Ish.

Honourable mention goes to whoever this is, who appears to have a tattoo saying 'MAIYA' on her hand, in, you guessed it, Bleeding Cowboys. Wow. And you thought a tramp stamp was bad.


http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/120/5ca2aa05189dc6bed8df7d2e14cd3bab/l.jpg


Yes, rant over. But really, isn't it an awful font?

The Shuttle

I'm trapped in a rather unpleasant trap. It is unpleasant because it is entirely of my construction. In fact, I'm going to save you a lot of time and tell you that it is my inertia and laziness. If you want to know the boring details, read on. Otherwise the gist of this post is essentially the 1st 3 sentences of this paragraph.

The daily routine is something along the lines of wake up, nourishment, go to sleep. That is one day. Between various stages of nourishment I need to keep myself occupied. So, I start watching TV. Fairly standard stuff that I watch. On taking a break from TV I move to the computer and start reading stuff on the net and writing paltry stuff. After a suitable amount of time, I leave the computer, wander around the house and land up back at the TV.

This struck me rather violently when I realized I could set up a shuttle at home which has 'TV' and 'Computer' as main destinations, with smaller stops like 'Toilet' and 'Dining Table', and 'Bed' at night. The horror..

Note: This will change, considering my internship will start tomorrow. Ah, well. Like life, there is only a limited amount of time to satisfy my pointless wants.