The Chennai Tied Test

Except Maninder's famous dismissal, I had never seen any footage of the Chennai tied Test. But random Youtubing reveals tonnes of delights, especially for cricket fans who would never otherwise be able to see rare videos like these.

Here are a bunch of men — some of the toughest individuals known to cricket — and they talk for this film like excited school boys who know they've done something special.

Don't miss:

1) Border's arguments with umpire Dotiwala who threatened to send him off the field, and Border checking with Boon, "Can he do that?" Boon's reaction: "Buggered if I know!"

2) Chetan Sharma and Tim Zoehrer's animated argument. Chetan told him where he will put his bat if Zoehrer didn't stop chirping, and Zoehrer actually bent over. I've never seen anything like this.

3) Dean Jones talking about how the Appollo Hospital staff abandoned a badly injured patient with broken legs to treat his dehydration.

4) Umpire Vikram Raju's explanations for giving Maninder LBW when everybody else saw the inside edge. And the part where Ravi Shastri confronted him.

5) Shastri feeding off the crowd's energy as India got closer to 348. And why he stayed away from Kapil as he walked out to bat. Brilliant.

6) Greg Matthews, who wore two jumpers in the Chennai heat, doing things to get on the crowd's nerve.

Watch the videos here:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

A Pitch For Banning All Religion

From the video description:

'The Pitch' is a segment on ABC TV's 'The Gruen Transfer' where two ad companies compete to 'sell the unsellable'. Past example of selling the unsellable include invading New Zealand, compulsory euthanasia for the elderly, cosmetic surgery for children and introducing a parent licence.

Here, two ad agencies make pitches for banning all religion. Fascinating stuff.

Watch:

The greatest piece of choreography in the history of Indian cinema

No shit.

On Google, I looked up the title of the film, Pyaasi Raat, and found this article on Passionforcinema:

for fuck’s sake this was shot on FILM……it went to the processing lab and they even fucking edited this……..there was a singer….someone wrote it….someone sung it…there was a studio booked for this……someone held a crew at ransom to shoot this….how the hell did anyone pull this off……i soooo want to watch the entire film…….HOW CAN I FIND IT?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy says the second worst poetry in the universe is by Azgoths of Kria. It's so bad that:

...during a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning four of his audience died of internal haemmorhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

Grunthos is reported to have been 'disappointed' by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilisation, leap straight up through his neck and throttle his brain.

And why am I talking about The Guide? What you're about to see here might just make your intestine make an attempt on your life.



There will be some of you reading this from your offices where Youtube is blocked, so you will see an empty white space above this.

You can see the video on a proxy website. Just paste this link at any of these websites: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Update: A colleague asked me why I was searching Pyaasi Raat on Google. In my defense, I have to say that I decided to search for details of the film after I read its name in one of the comments on the video. I'm innocent. I don't even have two gigabytes of porn on my laptop. God promise!

"Where you want it?"

The TVCs for the Indian Cricket League are a riot. I particularly loved the one on the Chennai Superstars. [Video below]



Then there are the Delhi Jets, Hyderabad Heroes, Kolkata Tigers, Chandigarh Lions and Mumbai Champs.

Torn, and twisted

Torn is one of the songs from that fantastic debut album by Natalie Imbruglia, Left of the Middle.

The song, the video of which you can see here, is not my favourite from the album but this video based on the song that I’ve posted here is the funniest thing I've seen in the whole of 2006.

You can also see a lengthier version of the same mime act. But this time Natalie herself joins in the act. What a sport! I haven't laughed this hard all year.