thoughts

I saw this movie yesterday with lot of anticipation, for it is the first venture for Steven Soderbergh. His Traffic was a wonderful movie that captured the essence of drug dealing from the views of diverse people, from mongers to parents. And of course Erin Brockovich was outstanding too. But this is a very different plot, which revolves around four people and the lack of communication between them, their sex lives, their lies and a voyeur’s videotapes.

Ann is pent-up sexually and her husband John has an affair with her sister, of course without ann’s knowledge. In the meantime, Graham, a fetish college friend of John comes into the lives of the three and changes it rather dramatically. Everyone lies about their sex lives and Graham happens to drive the two women out to reveal their secrets and change their lives with the women agreeing to talk about sex. He videotapes them. Admitting that he is an impotent in the presence of a girl, Graham gets excited by watching the videos of women talking and doing whatever they want to do.

Alhough the characters are not necessarily the best choices, in my opinion (I am not a great fan of Andie MacDowell by the way), they blend into their assigned roles pretty well. Its indeed amazing that an erotic movie could be achieved without any nudity.

Awkward and repelling, nevertheless, well-made with the Soderbergh’s touch.

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Sex Lies & Videotape In IMDB, In Amazon

Not exactly puzzles, yet puzzling. Lateral thinking puzzles can probably be explained thus. But it would clear you if you try this sample (one of my favorites). Assume whatever you want and please do not expect all inputs to be given to you.

Ok, the sample here:

A man went to a party and drank a punch. He then left early. Everyone else in the party who drank the punch (from the same bottle or whatever) subsequently died of poisoning. Why did the man not die?

Before the answer is given to you, why don’t you try solving the puzzle yourself?

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Well, time up. Here is the solution: The ice cubes in the punch had been poisoned. And when our man drank the punch the ice cubes were yet to get dissolved in it to poison him too.

How is that?! You might scoff at me, but hey, this deviation from the normal pattern makes it a lateral thinking puzzle. And makes it very interesting to me.

Want to try more of those? Check this out: Brain Food

Today one of my long time friends mailed me saying that he reads my blogs. Thanks bud. That gives me some more encouragement to write and more responsibility to write sensibly.

And my brother was mentioning that readers should automatically be informed (via email maybe) whenever a blog is posted, that way he doesn’t need to visit when there is nothing updated.

Well, two comments here: 1. Shows that we are becoming lazy these days (sorry dude, I know I am lazier than you) 2. I am still in the preliminary stage of blogging and haven’t yet accomplished to think so high. Thanks for the point anyway.

The usage ‘Et al’ in the banner sentence is quoted to be wrong (thanks subramani), for et al refers only to people and occurances in text. I’ll change that.

Easter Eggs in Software

You would be hearing about eggs a lot today, today being easter. But do you know about easter eggs in softwares? In software jargon, a crptic function or sequence of functions revealing something surprising, nice and unexpected is an easter egg. Try this if you are using Windows OS.

* Start Freecell game (possibly Start->Programs->Accessories->Games->Freecell)

* Press Ctrl+Shift+F10

You just won the game, din’t you?

Interestingly with DVDs becoming popular these days, I heard that they are encode easter eggs in the DVDs. Not sure if they will work only when you play them in computers or even when you play them in DVD players. Nevertheless, its something interesting.