Via Dashes: The Singhsons. Not bad at all. I kept getting unsolicited mail from Badmash on my school account, so I unsubscribed. Badmash is not just another web comic — it’s the only South Asian one. Meh, I’d read it if it was consistently funny. But this one is not too shabby. I would love to see a desi Simpsons spin-off. Or better still, a Family Guy spin off.
Yes, it’s 5:00 in the morning. Yes, I should be going home…
Holy Crap! I’ve just been blogrolled by Anti. This increased the readership of my blog by… one (maybe).
“Holy Crap” were also the first words to come out of my mouth when I entered my office today. The lighting economy experts had come and replaced the harsh glare of fluorescent tubelights with… more fluorescent tubelights. It’s such a pity, after working for a year in a gloomy cubicle-farm with dim lighting that made you fall asleep the instant you took your seat and turned the computer on, I expected more out of my graduate research office. My office turned out to be situated in one of those grim, modernistic 60s buildings, built by someone who probably read The Fountainhead too many times. The lighting was, once again, provided by tubelights — tubelights that didn’t even have the decency to conceal themselves under false ceilings. When I heard about these energy-efficiency experts, I had hoped for a soothing, yellow lampshade glow.
Such a pity.
I received one of those chain-mails this morning. It wasn’t of the benevolent type that you can safely ignore, the type that implies a direct correlation between n days of good luck and m number of people I forward it to. No, this was of the more threatening variety, the one that promised death, sodomy, supernatural occurrences, or all of the above. The mail read, “This is a picture of a girl who was killed last week. If you don’t forward it to 5 people in 5 minutes, this girl will appear tonight and stab you!”. As I scrolled down the interminable message headers, a photoshopped picture of a zombie girl, with green, rotting skin, yellow eyes, a nasty grimace appeared. I pawed the “Page Up” key frantically.
My first encounter with images of gory women came when I was 13. I watched The Exorcist in an open-air theater. Despite the fact that there were thousand more people around me, I was mortified by the horrifying shrieks emanating from the screen and had to resort to peering through a piece of torn paper, which I pretended I was reading. The green and possibly pus-filled face of Linda Blair, along with a tongue rivalling that of Gene Simmons, haunted my nightmares and daymares. Around the same time, I saw some Tamil horror movies, “My dear Lisa” and “13-aam number veedu”, which only proved to worsen my fear of women with green faces and white saris. My most recent encounter with this irrational fear of demonic women was from the movie The Ring where, once again, my aversion to them was reinforced by the addition of oriental eyes and a bad hairdo.
A simple google search announced that Caligynephobia does exist and, yes, it can be cured by ingesting ample quantities of painkillers and repeated exposure to beautiful women. but what about the irrational fear of ugly women, who are demoniacally possessed? Does science have a cure for my particular fear?