Procrastiblog

Ha!
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Kochi: not my thing. Reminded me a lot of Charleston, SC, in a weird way: both are old shipping centers with nothing much going on that attract tourists and antiquers. The synagogue was pretty nice (the city has a historic Jewish community—Jew Town (no kidding)—that now consists of 14 people from 3 families).

Something which turned out to be really worthwhile that you would think was a suckers’ game is the “you buy we cook” fish stands down by the waterfront. Maybe we got ripped off in relative terms (we paid around Rs 600 for a 3 crabs and 2 lobsters, and another Rs 150 to get them cooked), but the food was really yummy. A tip: curry crab should be cracked away from the diner and should not be eaten in a rush.

P.S. Lots of goats and cats, not so many cows and dogs. Why is that?

P.P.S. Deb asked pretty much every local he met for the first two days where he could get some crab and the answer was invariably “no chance” since it was out of season. Every fish guy on the waterfront was selling crab, and most of it was alive (and therefore fresh). WTF?!

P.P.P.S. We showed up on the one day of every month when alchohol is not permitted to be sold anywhere in the city. We happened across a place that was selling beer out of a hole in the wall—seriously—but we didn’t have the good sense to purchase it or the guts to photograph the hole.

Happy
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Went to Kerala for the weekend and spent Friday and Saturday morning on a houseboat in the backwaters of Kumarakom (photo set here). This was an incredibly nice experience. The boat, which had two bedrooms sleeping four people, cost Rs 4750 (that’s almost exactly USD 100) for about 24 hours of floating, drifting, idling, and relaxing (incl. a crew of three men, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a basket of bananas). You would think this sort of arrangement would involve docking at various villages where people would be lined up to sell us useless knick-knacks and handicrafts. Nope. The docking was entirely non-commercial in nature. The only up-selling attempted was: Rs 800 for a kilogram of prawns with dinner (not worth it), Rs 100 for 2 liters of toddy (kind of disgusting), and Rs 800 for a massage (we said no). Everybody, everywhere: go do this! It’s fun! (Caveat emptor: these are off-season rates. Prices include a fair chance of monsoons.)

POSTSCRIPT: Shout out to the nice people at the Tharavadu Heritage Home who kindly helped us arrange for the boat in exchange for, at best, a kickback from the boat’s proprietor (we didn’t give them any money, anyway).

If your houseboy should spend the weekend watching your TV with his friends, or if he should take naps in your bed when you are not around, it is not worth your effort to complain about it. It is not worth it to explain the subtleties of your unease to the accomodations manager, who will ignore them anyway and scold the boy for some vaguely related misdeed. It is not worth it when the boy will act abashed for about five minutes and then continue to do exactly the same things over and over again. Not. Worth. It. At all.

With all due respect to my blogging/life partner, this explanation is no more credible than if she claimed to be establishing a model democracy in the middle of my face. Whatever after-the-fact justifications H might provide in order to maintain public support for her bellicose position, it is clear to me—and, I think, to any reasonable observer—that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing my beard.

Extrapolating from my first 24 hours in the presence of the beard, I calculate that some variant of the phrase “You have some Indian food in your beard” would be repeated approximately 125 times over the next six weeks. Which would be clearly unreasonable.

As some of you (if not most of you) (if not all of you) know, I have recently been joined in India by my wife, Hilleary. I’ve asked her to start blogging with me, adding another ignorant American’s perspective to the picture. My suggestion for her first post: “Why the Beard Had to Go”.

Matthew Yglesias takes on Andrew Sullivan’s latest on Iraq. Sullivan is against “any timetable for withdrawal” from “a war conducted by an administration whose key players are manifestly incompetent and reckless.” He is for… prayer. Yglesias:

This gets us toward what is, I think, a fairly fundamental point of political morality — it’s wrong, seriously wrong and seriously irresponsible, to support military action that has no likely prospects of success. It’s one thing to ask young men and women to kill and die for a good cause. It’s another thing entirely to ask them to kill and die as a token of your support for a good cause.

Clearly, my first-choice scenario for the world would be one in which the nominal goals of American Iraq policy — killing terrorists, preventing a civil war, building a stable liberal democracy — are achieved. But I can’t support the war — can’t say it was a good idea to launch it, and can’t say I think it’s a good idea to continue it — precisely because I don’t think the war is accomplishing its goals, don’t think it stands a good chance of accomplishing them, and don’t think it ever did stand a good chance of accomplishing them.

How hot can “hot red paprika” be? Very hot. “Crisp capsicum” can be pretty hot too, although I think “capsicum” sounds a little more suspicious than “paprika”, which is after all most commonly a fairly bland and inert spice. But I guess “paprika” is just a generic word for a pepper here and I suspect what I got is something along the lines of a red serrano.

Which is a long way around to discussing Pizza Hut’s Indian-themed pizza offerings. The best I’ve had so far was the Tandoori Murg, which has chunks of chicken and a non-standard, Indian-spiced sauce that I found very pleasing. The Tandoori Paneer pizza was disappointing, with bland chunks of paneer and the aforementioned chunks of hot, hot peppers. (I guess my paper menu is a misprint, because it didn’t even have a little red pepper next to it.) The other pizzas I’ve tried are more or less as you would expect: a little spicier than an American pie, but nothing too far out (unlike Pizza Corner, which packs a fairly strong punch).

And to those who wonder why I’m eating pizza at all: eat daal and chapati for 6 weeks straight and get back to me.

Coffee Maker, the Second
Originally uploaded by C+H.

The Nova died. That was a bad Rs 1000 investment. I place my trust (and my Rs 1800) in the hands of the Philips Corporation of the Netherlands. Can you last two months, little helper?