The Sunflower State

All ye Dorothys and Wizards of Oz, if you have any pride in calling Kansas as The Sunflower State, start fortifying your borders now. Kansas, if viewed as a giant sunflower field, can be dramatically classified as a threat to the freedom and democracy of California.
The Governor of California is proudly parading his Hummer that runs on 100% vegetable oil! Did you notice that bumper sticker and how happy Arnie looks? He looks like an extremely proud ringmaster pointing at a ferocious lion on a vegan diet! What an insult to the Hummer! Hummers should not be on the road in the first place. A Hummer running on oil meant to fry freedom fries? The amount of vegetable oil required to fuel Arnie's car for 1 day is probably the annual supply of vegetable oil for our kitchen.
Singer Sheryl Crow recently toured the US on a biofuel powered bus to promote climate-change awareness. She wants to create a world of loolessness and calls for a limit of 1 square of toilet paper per sitting. Clearly, she has never eaten dhal makhani!
So, where do these Hollywood educated eco-friendly champions think we are going to find the land to grow the amount of biofuels to keep all the engines in the West oiled? Will the Middle East start growing sunflowers in their deserts?
If only these people understand the land realities. Someone in the UN seems to, but who listens to the UN anyway. You need somebody with a more serious name than Ban Ki Moon at the top for that day to come.
If this whole idea of "feeding your car with cooking oil" catches on India, I can see the likes of Suffola and Parachute giving a run for Shell's money... atleast in Kerala. An average aunty can make fresh samosas in the car and the kids would have such a memorable picnic! Aditya Chopra wouldn't have had to shoot DDLJ in the UK just for a pretty poster. Maddy wouldnt have had to run his TVS-50 on kerosine-adulterated-petrol from the Taramani (village behind IIT-M campus) guy!

Techie Talk

I was on a support call a few minutes ago to assist a customer with installation of our software. We typically ask customers to provide us with a server with Dual Processor, 1GB RAM and 20GB free disk space.
Customer "This one is a very well spec-ed server. Its got 16CPUs, 64bit Processor and 800GB of free space"
Me "Thats when you know you are dealing with an oil company!!"

Wind Mill

Just back from a short pleasure trip to Netherlands. One among the many unique things we saw was the number of windmills. I felt quite at home amongst those windmills since I am one of them in a vague sense. This blog is testimony to the fact that I can churn out a lot of 'hot air', i.e., I am a "wind" mill. Anyways, in particular, we went to this village, Zaanse Schans, which is quite famous for its windmills. We went into one of them, which is still in use to produce oil. The "miller" was an unpleasant fella. He had such an air around him that had he stuck a tiny fan around him, he could have produced some useful energy as well. There were couple of other very tiny windmills around his house, one of them probably connected to his commode or re-charge one of his AA batteries for his digital camera. Don't abuse an idea, people! Please!

The last thing I am going to say before I shut up for today is the general behavior of Japanese tourists. We are at a "clog" factory when the guy annouced that the next demostration was to start in a few seconds. Instantly, you see a mini marathon of window shopping Japanese tourists run to the demo area. Same story at the airport. I tell you, the opposite of stand-at-ease is Japanese!