moderation and prudence

Here's a surprise for anyone that knows me. I've stopped using an alarm clock. The 60 rupee model I was using broke about two weeks ago. At first, I let it slide. After a few days of realizing my alarm clock's still broken - this realization is only right before going to bed - I decided I needed to do something about it. So before falling asleep, I've been thinking real hard about getting up when I see the right amount of light on the window shades. Boom, it works. It happens between 7:45 and 8:30 in the morning. I'm getting better at the timing. It's amazing how you can improve at timing if you put your mind to it, like when Maya and I used to bet on when our math professor was going to take off his sweater. He always did at some point in the lecture, and after the first four dozen lectures or so of this, we got it down pretty good - three minute windows were going for a dollar each.

Today Ewan and I started walking to work as normal. When we got out to the major street, something seemed off. There were people walking up and down the middle of the street. Unbeknownst to us, today was a full-scale bandh day. That means no cars, no motorcycles, no businesses open whatsoever. One of the major communist political parties called this strike, the UML. That stands for United Marxist-Leninists, which is interesting because the communists are collectively referred to as the Maoists often.

What made the rest of the walk really interesting was that Ewan was carrying an old motorcycle tire. It has a future in one of the prototypes he's working on, and he picked it up over the weekend for free. Thing is though, when students have protests in Kathmandu, they almost always cover tires with kerosene and set them on fire. Nothing puts out a burning tire. The rioters get up really early in Nepal, and these protests usually happen around 8:30AM in our area. We've seen this quite a few times. So here we are, walking down the major street at 9:00AM, on a bandh day, carrying an old tire. We say to each other that this doesn't look very good, especially if there's been a tire-burning protest already this morning. When we round the next corner, sure enough, there are the remains of some burned up tires, lots of riot police, and a lot of people milling about. We were quite the focus of attention as we slid past the edge. Just great.

The internet doesn't close, though. Today I happened to visit imdb.com to look something up. It says Catwoman comes out on DVD tomorrow - ee gad. This has been addressed.