Life in the 1500's.

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Hey foxy mama! You smell pretty, wanna smell me?

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, Don't throw the baby out with the bath water..

OOPS! (insert dead baby joke here)

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, It's raining cats and dogs.

Yeah, Cats n Bitches.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.


The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, Dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying - a thresh hold.


(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)


In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, 'Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old'.. or, alternatively, 'some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it in the pot, nine days old'..

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could 'bring home the bacon'. They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.. 

HAHA! Pigs are awesome. 

Those with money had plates made of pewter (some weird alloy.. google it). Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach into the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.


Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the drinkers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.


England is a shitty old small place, and the locals started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a ...dead ringer..


And that's the truth...

Hot chick and skull? I can has ticket pleez? :)

(P.S... HAHA. gotcha. OK no seriously, some of these are actually true. :D)

True Freedom and a lot of Adrenaline

The best opportunites in life, are truly those, that spring a surprise and blow you away like Mt Vesuvius blew away Pompeii. 'Knock knock' 'Who is it?''Surprise!' KABLAOAAAMMM.
The following piece of writing is testimony to this very phenomenon.

Really Pretty Vienna

Vienna, the capital of Austria, is a city of Parks, Gardens & magnificent Romanesque and Gothic architecture. Probably one of the most eye-ball-popping-beautiful cities ever built by mortal hands. 

So here we were, in Vienna, Austria this summer, my friends and me, on another awesome weekend adventure. Our aimless trolling lead us to all sorts of brilliant places, that totally made our jaws drop in AWE, which I'm pretty sure is how most guys (and some women) react when they see Megan Fox in a swimsuit or less. Anyway. 

Danube Tower by night. Notice the leap off ramp.

So somewhere in Vienna, along the Wien river, is this really tall tower called the Danube tower, which is a pretty cool place to hang out. And what's EVEN cooler about this Star-Wars reminiscent tower, is that every few minutes, you can see someone falling off of the top, with absolute disregard for reason & rationality, and a rope bound to the ankles.

There is just something about jumping off a building into the vast emptiness beneath your feet that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on edge. Call it Bungy, Bunji, Le Benji or plain suicide practice, Bungee jumping is one BAD-ASS sport. One slight drawback, however, is that it's freakishly expensive, so you may have to additionally part with a lot of moolah apart from your sanity.

Well, I was, as lady luck would have it, standing below this 500-odd-foot tall tower, looking up at the periodic hollering of crazy people falling off. And then my rebellious evil twin had an evil idea... My evil twin had a brilliant idea... My evil twin had a brilliantly evil idea... Meh. when YOUR evil twin has an idea THIS insane, you won't be able to resist it either...
DiCaprio, in inception said something on these lines:
 “What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea."
Heh. This time, my evil twin had IDEA alright, a parasite more resilient than the bloody Common Flu Virus. And me? I stole it from him.

A view from the top of the tower.

So I go up to the counter, empty my pockets, and forfeit my sanity. A four minute elevator ride later, I stand in line, awaiting my turn to jump off, on the observation deck of the tower. Five HUNDRED feet higher than where i stood earlier, and I dare say it looks WAY higher from up here. I can see the entire city from up here, with the river snaking through it. I can even see the little hamlets and windmills on its outskirts, that is how FREAKISHLY high it is. It's about Six in the evening.. 

Another view from top.

I can see the Sun beginning to wind down the day. The wind is strong and cool, similar to what one encounters in an open top convertible on a freeway. The adrenaline in me soars so high, I bet I could supply a little hospital enough to keep a couple of patients alive. At that moment, however, fear is definitely not an emotion in my head.

My turn arrives, and I walk out to the ramp, which is cantilevered to the side of the tower. As the crew on top attach the harness to me and  the rope to my ankles, I can see people the size of pin-heads standing below. I stand RIGHT on the edge, as the crew take away the safety measures meant to keep me from accidentally tumbling five hundred feet, and I'd be lying if I said I ain't scared. Haha. Even my evil twin recedes into his crevice like a scared little cat. From here on, I'm on my own. The crew counts down from Five.. Four.. Three.. Two.. One.... and then silence. "Ah, what the heck", I think out loud, taking a breath, and then diving off the edge.

Yes, that IS me jumping, and I'd hate to stop bragging about it.

The wind screams at my face, chokes my incessant urge to scream out in a mixture of fear & utter awesome exhilaration. Free-fall. There is NO feeling that comes even CLOSE to free fall. Free-fall is true freedom embodied in its most awesome 4x4 package. I think to myself, as I remember distinctly, "So THIS is how it feels!". In a few hundred miliseconds, I see the city of Vienna fall toward me.. in those few miliseconds I feel I've lived longer than I have in the past 20 years. It lasts for a couple of seconds, and then I feel the huge reactive tug of the long-forgotten bungee rope on my ankles.

Sip this.. nay.., chug this..

I was sitting in this off-the-charts shady pub last night, with some compadrés and an insane chug-fest being the order of the house, and i thought to myself, what better to write about, than the awesomeness of ale!

Aye', 'tis Beer i speak of. All who have experienced the WHOOP-DE-DOO-WAAAHAAAHA of a chilled pint slippin n sliding down the thorax, will agree with me when I proclaim that it probably is the second most awesome creation of man after the good'ol WHEEL.

All those who haven't felt it.. you just officially declared to yourself that you've wasted away your existence. But there is still time! Go get yourself some WHOOP-DE-DOO-WAAHAAAHA!!! Beer is one of those things you have to acquire a taste for, kinda like Frog legs or Crab meat or Blue Fungal Cheese that is left to mature in a Yak's intestine in the darkest corners of Tibet (*slurp*, seriously :D).

Blue Cheese. Hehe. Yummmy. NAWT. :D

Sure, there are enough people in this world who feel like marrying the drink after their very first swig (speaking from experience), but if you didn't feel that way the first time your friend tried to get you high, all you need to do is go out there a couple times more, get thirsty, and take another headlong dive into that bottle'o Bud.

Apparently, This beverage is reeeheeeheee-ally old. I mean so old that some dude in Mesopotamia somewhere around 3500 B.C. made this stuff before he came up with the concept of GOD! In fact I'm pretty sure that the two are related. I'm pretty sure that the neanderthal Iranian jocks worshipped the guy who came up with this 'gift from the heavens'.

Some dude wrote the recipe for beer on this tablet 5500 years ago, Now we worship him.

The Germans are arguably the most skilled Beer brewers in the world, and suddenly you realize that they're one kickass bunch of people. History has pretty much proved that, right from the times of my favorite Impaler, dear Vlad. If one ever gets to go anywhere in and/or around Deutschland, it would be criminally WRONG to NOT get yourself a pint of 'Weissbier of Munich', or 'Münchener Wießbier', as it was known to them Kaiser descendants.

Franziskäner Weißbier. Bliss. 

One of the amazing side-effects of Beer is the hippity happity hap-hap-happy high. Unlike other alcohols that make you feel like you just just burnt an entire litter of puppies, Beer highs feel like you just blew a Vuvuzela in Barack Obama's conference, IN HIS FACE, and then flew back to the BATCAVE. :D

Also, Beer is so outright badass, its been considered to have medicinal properties. So that's an excuse for all you health freaks to go get some for yourself. Plus if you do not like ONE kind of Beer, don't despair. There is a gazillion types of Beer available, and be rest assured, somewhere out there, is that special one for you. :D

Damn I'm thirsty..  WHOOP-DE-DOO-WAAHAAAHA. Ciaô.

The chaos called home.

Hey Guys.

As I take my fledgling steps into the vast blogosphere, there is this battalion of thoughts blitzkrieg-ing through my mind's strife-ravaged battlefield. One of them, however, commands my attention far more distinctly than others, almost enslaving my fingers as they prance around on the QWERTY. Surprising as it may seem, this one isn't remotely wicked. So my evil twin howls as I stab him with a gilded Schiavona and decide to write about a rather cliched and tame topic, the time I popped back to Mama India.


The first thing that flip-kicks me in the face, as I exit the aircraft door after a 4000 mile long voyage, is the stifling humidity. Accompanying that, comes its Bambaiyya pal, the stench. It's like the city slaughtered a couple thousand animals, and left them to rot for a week, JUST for MY arrival!! (YAY!). Oh! and hold on.. that's just the prologue to a series of home-coming gifts that'd make Vlad the Impaler barf all over his Mommy.

After a half-hour-long squabble and bargain with the Rickshaw-waala for the ride home, the next part of the ordeal involves sitting through the rickety ride, akin to a mortally scary level black++ Canoeing challenge.
And just when I'm about to step out of the dude's rickety ride, he goes 'भाईसाहब चालीस रुपिया extra'. At the end of my tether, I finally give in to the shameless demand of his outstretched hand.

I reach home, as my super ecstatic Mom awaits my knock on the door. My twin grumbles to himself as I try to escape Mom's squeals and bear-hugs .. Piping hot, home-cooked, insanely delicious INDIAN food lies begging to be eaten, and I pounce upon it like a freaking man eating Minotaur .. My own bed feels so unbelievably good, I could flip off King Louis the 'n'th , and he'd stare back in jealousy like a schoolboy denied candy. :-)

The next few days, it's time to get back to all I have missed out on in the summer. I greet a horde of friendly faces with the ritualistic howls that our 'forefathers' have yelled out for generations, and a similar volley of abuses is hurled my way. I imagine the Terminator go "I AM BACK" in that holocaust reminiscent voice.

I meet more friends. Old friends, and you don't really get excuses better than that for pulling back on a couple of Jugs of Beer. Life is starting to get awesome.


I am back to the run down hellholes that my university offers as sad excuses for student hostels, back to stinky mice rummaging through my stuff, back to mess food that'd make a Billy Goat cry his holy Bejesus out, back to mosquitoes that mysteriously bite people ONLY on their booties and back to a football field that is so awesome you can play Water-polo in (on?) it.

Its raining outside, as I sit here with a hot cup of tea, listening to a certain Mr. Buckethead wail out insane guitar solos. It feels so good to be back home, my mind does a double back flip off of a 500 foot tall TV tower. Again.