Whitewater Rafting and Crazy Mohan

Continuing with the trend of writing nonsense posts about nothing (a la Seinfeld) here's another one for your reading pleasure. Nothing new really to report on the home front. We finally bit the bullet and booked the West Virginia whitewater rafting trip. We are rafting on the Lower New River which is supposed to be more adventurous than the Upper New River. And while we are at it, we are also doing a zip line canopy tour. And because we spent too much time thinking if we should do the trip, all the cabins were sold out by the time we booked and we are going to be camping. Joy! Despite my love for adventure trips, I have never been enthusiastic about camping. I mean, I need a nice soft bed to lie on at night with no possibility of bugs and also set the temperature to what I want, precise to the degree. Is that too much to ask for? And thus, I have been avoiding camping successfully for the three years that I have been in the United States. I guess all good things must come to an end and S put his foot down at staying in a motel one hour away and driving in for all the activities. If I survive to tell the tale, you can be assured that I will put up a post with pics like I did for our Vegas trip.

Plans are underway to buy a PS3 Slim. But I am wondering if I should hold out till the Move comes out. Any thoughts here? Also I am pretty sure we will be buying an XBox after the Kinect releases, so Microsoft fanboys don't need to send me any brickbats. :-) Considering all I have played till now are Mario variants, some game suggestions would be nice. I am really interested in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - does anyone know if I can just pick it up and start playing, having never played any game in the Call of Duty franchise? Sometimes I have a feeling that even if I own every possible gaming console available, I would still end of playing Super Mario Galaxy! :-)

Talking about recent purchases, I have placed an order for "Marriage Made in Saloon" DVD at Kalakendra. I am a crazy fan of Crazy Mohan (notice my clever word pun here!) and I own all his available DVDs. But unfortunately, I have never even once seen his drama live on stage. All my family members, who are not fans, leave alone fanatics of Crazy Mohan, have gone his plays multiple times. In fact, H who openly claims that she likes S. Ve Shekar better and my cousins have had Crazy Mohan and Maadhu Balaji come upto them and talk while they were waiting for the car after the show! When I spent 3.5 years of my life in the desert that is Pilani, Crazy and his troupe put up a show there in the 6 months that I was doing a "project" in Bangalore. When I went to India last November, I was determined to watch one of his plays. But in perfect timing, they had just one show the day I arrived and another the day after I leave with nothing in between. You have no idea how incredibly jealous I am of this guy. He casually mentions that he is Crazy Mohan's relative. He then goes on to say that he asked Maadhu Balaji to introduce him to "Saloon Muthu". I would have been deliriously happy to have someone introduce me to Crazy Mohan and Maadhu Balaji just so that I can take a picture with them and show it off to everyone I know. Life is very unfair sometimes! But "Saloon Muthu" is one of my favorite characters too. The way he says "Rrramsamiiiii" is just plain awesome. But my favorite character in the one who plays "Munnusamy" in this play. He has a distinct voice and modulates it really well. "Mythili purushanama ni? Ipo ellam purinjurthu, Janaki oda amma saar oda mootha samsaram." Just thinking about it makes me laugh.

Since this post is pretty disjointed anyway, let me talk about the movie we saw yesterday "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo". I have been heaping a lot of praise about this book, so much that even S picked it up and managed to finish it. So when I saw that the movie was playing in Sundance Theater, we both wanted to watch that. It was everything that you would expect from a book made into a movie. It was well made and mostly faithful to the book. The movie matched the dark tones of the book. But why did they have to pick awful looking people to star in it? Blomkvist was supposed to be a handsome man in his forties (with a boyish charm if I remember right) Nyquist (who plays Blomkvist) looked alright (in parts) but definitely not boyishly handsome. And Salander was alright, but she somehow didn't look lean or young enough. And while she did a good job in most parts, I never saw her do the "lopsided smile" described in the book. Worst of the lot was Erica Berger - the classy, distinguished Erica was reducing to being a 50 year old bimbo wannabe with unfortunate blond hair. Why why why? But all said and done, it was a good movie and I am glad we watched it.