How would you feel if your teacher tells you that you will be tested on the first 5 chapters of your maths book? That’s cruel but acceptable,  you would say. But what if the test has questions on 5 totally different chapters instead? Of chapters you weren’t told to prepare? For a moment let’s forget how you would feel about it and let’s think of a term you would use for it. Google it if you wish to but you’ll find nothing. I’ll tell you. From 13th May 2012 onwards, it’s going to be called getting Clatted.

For the last 2 weeks I haven’t studied anything but Current Affairs and they have the audacity to ask this in the exam:

Name the ocean which is ‘S’ shaped.

Excuse me for a moment but what in hell’s name? And this is what the syllabus had to say about the GK section.

This section will only test students on their knowledge of current affairs (broadly defined as matters featuring in the mainstream media between March 2011 and March 2012)

Dissimilar, much?

Now I’m no eistein (or John Austin, in this case) but unless and until the ocean changed it’s shape to that of the letter ‘S’ during the time period between March 2011 and March 2012, the question was invalid in regard to the paper. It had no place in CLAT 2012′s paper. And this wasn’t the only question. Let me tell you some more.

“Man is a social animal” – Which thinker said this?

Seems like a legit question? Yes. The answer? Aristole. Someone who died in 322 BC. And if my calender is correct, Aristotle could not have said that between March 2011 and March 2012. Even the Mayans would agree with me (the world’s not ending by the way. Yes, you’ll stay a virgin this year).

And here’s another one.

Leukemia is a disease related to what?

Was Leukemia discovered in April 2012? September? November? January? March? It was discovered in the 5th century! HOW IN HELL’S NAME *tries to cool down* is this Current Affairs? Have mercy on me and enlighten me. I beg for it.

See all GK questions of Clat 2012 here, on ClatGyan.com.

And GK wasn’t the only section where they screwed up. NLU Jodhpur continued to show there ignorance in the Legal section as well. Terms like void ab initio weren’t explained when it was said that even commonly known terms like patent will also be explained. Some questions didn’t have  principles stated (not a mistake. We were supposed to use the legal knowledge we had, something we were supposed to have.). Some questions required advanced knowledge about certain laws which, quite naturally, required prerequisite knowledge. And advanced one at that.  And the number of questions that were valid  barely managed to cross the single digit mark. Some question required extensive knowledge about particular laws (things that are taught in the first/second year to law students). And this happened after this had been said beforehand.

Candidates will not be tested on any prior knowledge of law or legal concepts. If a technical/legal term is used in the question, that term will be explained in the question itself. For example, if the word patent is used, the meaning of patent (“a legal monopoly granted by the government for certain kinds of inventions”) will also be explained.

I have only one thing to say. FILE A PIL!

Ahhh…It is that time of the year again. The amusingly cold weather, the smell of burnt gunpowder in the air, the heebie-jeebies of your parents transferred to you while lighting that extremely dangerous bomb and ofcourse the sweets. So many goddamn sweets! That, my friends, is Diwali. Wrapped up in 35 words. But there is so much more to it than only crackers and sweets.

There is family for the social bee,
there is food for the foodie,
there are gifts for the greedy
and love for the needy.

It is tacky, I know. Thanks for pointing it out anyway.

Happy Diwali

And that’s not where it ends. That is where it begins. A hectic day for basically every soul in every Indian household and a lovely night for most (read women don’t get to enjoy that much). While the shopkeepers make enough to buy a couple of gold bricks, the average guy is hit hard. Wow, I am diverting from the topic. The topic? What is the topic? BAH. Nevermind. This post is done. Happy whatever.

PS: The auspicious timings for pooja on 26th October 2011 for Diwali 2011 are from 6:03pm to 07:58pm in stable Ascendant (Taurus sign).

Cookies are so yesterday. The Dark Side has something new to lure you now. It now has a new apprentice. Toast.

The Dark Side Has Toast

With my Open Letter To facebook, I had made it pretty clear that facebook was anything but stable. Since then, they have improved by great deal. So much so, that they have now even started predicting the future. If my sources are to be believed, then, this idea struck Mark Zukerberg while he was busy behaving awkwardly at f8. It is being said that Mark desperately wanted this feature — partly because he wanted to see what kind of spams and hacks facebook might have to face in the future, but mostly because he didn’t get any notification even after refreshing the homepage two hundred thousand gazzilion times.

So, together with Hrithik Roshan ‘s genius  father Rohit, from Koi Mil Gaya, Mark built a time machine which they have named [REDACTED]. Technical specs of the machine were unknown at the time of writing this post, but what is known is that the machine makes use of what the Neutrinos told us a few weeks back. While Mark was unavailable for comments, CERN conveniently decided not to respond to the several mails that were sent and calls that were made, asking about facebook’s new [REDACTED]. Below is a screenshot which proves that the time machine _does_ exist and is in fact working and predicting the future, if not saving it.

Let’s analyse this a bit

Sorry! You Entered An Old Password

Your password was changed at: Tomorrow at 152:am

If you don’t remember making this change,click here.

Call me a Grammar Nazi, if you may, but the typographical error where they forget to give a space after the comma “…making this change,click here” is the only thing that bugs me since we have already established the fact the machine exists.

UPDATE (2:00am, 14th October 2011): My account was hacked today. Exactly at the time facebook predicted it would. Thank you facebook?

Emma Watson Topless. Had a nice time, eh perverts?

via I can has cheez burger

We all have entered some weird stuff while trying to pass CAPTCHAs/reCAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are still fine; they aren’t sadists. But reCAPTCHAs? Oh boy, they are like pissed Nazi soldiers at a torture camp. They will do anything to make your life hell and then some more, just for the heck of it.  Ergo, more often that not, reCAPTCHAs come up with pretty weird shit they expect you to type. I mean how in hell’s name can you expect a user to write superscripts to subscripts usually prefixed with a sigma sign? I can barely type my name without looking at the keyboard (that’s a lie, get the hint).

I though I was human, until now.

But then,  in reCAPTCHAs you can type in whatever shit you want and it _will_ accept it. Because that’s how reCAPTCHAs roll. Yes, it is unethical since it is against the whole goddman concept, but give us a break, we are mere mortals.

Getting back to the point. Today was different. It wouldn’t be wrong to term it as very different, though I will not. I was on Pottermore, trying to reset my password which I had quite  foolishly obviously forgotten. Now there are days when you enter a recpatcha while listening to music, then there are days you frown a little – zoom in and enter the required word, then there are days when you scream and pull out your hair after looking at the reCAPTCHA, and then, after all those days comes a day when you simply laugh out loud,  somewhat at the mind-boggling CAPTCHA but mostly at your inability to solve it even though, after all those bad deeds (yes, I know what you did last night), you are human. You can always reqeust a new CAPTCHA, but then where is the fun in that?

Today was on of one of those days. Pottermore asked me to type a word in a language which I haven’t even written since the past year and half, leave alone typing it.

स्येतानि? Seriously? And then, on top of it, स्येतानि is raised to the power zero, on the wrong side of course. Ask  Voldemort to solve that thing and even he will turn up his nose at you. Oh wait.

This is a guest post from Laura Backes, she enjoys writing about all kinds of subjects and also topics related to internet service providers in my area.  You can reach her at: laurabackes8 @ gmail.com.  If you would like to write for TheDolt’s Blog, do read our page Be My Guest; Write A Guest Post.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. What the heck does YouTube have to do with theatre, right? Can anything make theatre not lame? Okay, just hold your horses for a minute and let me expound. I was really bored this one  surprisingly fine day and I thought, hey, let me look up some plays on YouTube. That sounds cool! No. Not even close. Not even slightly close. I haven’t seen a play since freshman year, and that was Shakespeare. Long? Yes. Cool? Not so much. But I digress.

Anyway, there I was- bored, sitting in front of a computer, too brain-dead to even read anything. I was looking at funny Harry Potter pictures (yes, I’m a geek, we’ve established that), and I came across one on Deviant Art that had a very odd quote with a picture of a female Draco Malfoy. What. The. Heck? I figured someone with a sick sense of humor had done some sort of cos-play thing. And, in a sense, I was right. Below that strange pic was a link to something on YouTube called A Very Potter Musical. Okay… That sounds like an amusing idea. I was expecting a five minute musical- maybe something really lame like the Potter Puppet Pals (no offense, but I can’t stand those). What I got quite literally made me reevaluate my life.

Now you’re looking at me oddly. Yes, a musical parody of a children’s book made me reevaluate my life and no, you haven’t gone nuts, yet. First of all, this is no group of middle-school wannabe Daniel Radcliffes (the actor who played Harry Potter in the movies, fyi). These were college theatre students. That means they were adults. And not only were they adults, they were talented adults. And that made all the difference. The play was hysterical. The songs were perfect. The acting was over-the-top, just like a great comedy/parody should be. But you could see the talent in them. That is something that is most definitely missing from TV and movies today- talent.

Watching them made me realize something. Do you know why we like YouTube so much? Because it’s unpolished. It’s raw. You have to have something to make it there. It might be sheer stupidity. It might be singing talent. It might be luck. But whatever it is, YouTube allows anyone to show what they have- no money required. This is when I reevaluated things. I had been dissatisfied with what I was watching on TV and in the movies. I thought it was something wrong with me. Actors didn’t appeal to me, TV shows seemed repetitive and cliché; I was re-reading the same books and re-watching the same classic movies, trying to find out what that essential spark was that I was missing. And then I watched this, and it hit me. This is what was missing. There was nothing wrong with me; there was something essentially wrong with entertainment. When had perfection trumped talent?

Ah, ha! So now we come to the core of the matter. The individuality, the art, the very strangeness that makes actors/artists known and loved had been stripped away and shellacked over; hidden by a veneer of perfection and unattainable beauty. It is that imperfection- the odd pauses, the slightly off-key strum, the twitch of a smile during a serious scene- that makes actors people. That is how YouTube made theatre cool. A medium that allowed anyone to watch, over and over again, that one scene that they loved- recorded live, without retakes or outtakes, honest, pure and real. Want to see for yourself? Check them out them here.. I’m not saying they’re perfect, that’s precisely the point, but they are totally awesome.

New Delhi just experienced an earthquake which according to certain n()()bs news channels was measured 6.6 on the Richter Scale. And at times like these you realise how awesome XKCD is.

Confused? Let me explain.

I was blogging when everything started shaking. It was uncanny. Being my geeky self, rather than throwing my laptop and running for my life, I kept it down carefully  (for I am an optimist too) and ran outside. Once the initial shocks (that of the earth and that of my own mental self) subsided I went on to facebook and updated my status. I was one of the first ones to do it. In a short amount of time facebook and Twitter likewise were flooded with posts pertaining to the earthquake.

So where does XKCD come in? Well here.

I won’t be a hypocrite here. I posted a couple of status updates too. I’ll share them with you.

2 minutes after the earthquake

EARTHQUAKE! WTF!

17 minutes after the earthquake

So you survive an earthquake and the first thing that comes to your mind is to update your status?

18 minutes after the earthquake

6.6 on the Richter scale. Just hope it wasn’t 6.66. Or 6.666

19 minutes after the earthquake

For girls (and some boys too), the earthquake was almost orgasmic.

UDPATE: The earthquakle was measured 4.2 on richter. Stupid India TV I tell you.

Comic credits [XKCD]

I’m not really a big fan of I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER for most of their jokes (or rather puns) being based on people which live seven seas across me, pass me. When I do get their puns, I find some amusing; none hilarious. But yet I have subscribed to SO MUCH PUN.CON which makes a giggle or two come out of me once in a while. The following pun however, is hilarious. The reason probably being that it doesn’t belong to SO MUCH PUN.

Via WWIAO and ICANHASCHEEZBURGER

Dear Facebook,

Even though I know you are in deep shit_thanks to the perpetually-rising number of law suits you seem to be attracting and quite a few countries blocking you_I still hopelessly hope everything is well at your end. I’ve been spending too much time on fmylife.com so I think it is quite apparent as to how well I am doing. But this open letter is neither about your multi-million law suits nor my depressingly stupid life. It is about the mess that your system currently seems to be in.

Your comment system is a mess. You don’t notify me of new wall posts or the likes my comments receive. I have to stalk my own profile to see if something new has happened. It doesn’t seem fit to you to tell me about friend requests that I receive. When you do notify about something, you keep doing it until it pisses me off and I have to go to the notifications page and remove that particular God damn notification myself. On top of it all, you keep introducing new features like the new photo viewer. Take my word for it Facebook, everyone hates it. It’s just a giant pain in the ass. And don’t even get me started about the disappearance of the comment button. To increase security you very thoughtfully introduced Secure Browsing through https for the whole site rather than just the log-in but as expected, you screwed up: forgot to make sure that applications supported https as well. Now every time I have to use an application I have to disable https, log-out and log-in again to enable https again. The only features that seem to be working perfectly are poke,  status updates (thank God you can bypass the 420 character limit now). Your advertisement system works flawlessly though. Every time I type shit I can see advertisements corresponding to cat-shit-bags. Is it Mark or one of his programmers who seems to have developed some weird for fetish cat-shit-bags? I think they should spend a little time out of the office rather than working 24*7 while being wired in.

Seriously, tell me where the problem lies. Is it the servers?Is it the lazy, high-on-weed-programmers? Or is it Zuck himself?

You may be wondering as to what led to this sudden hysterical outburst of emotions. Here is the answer to your question: