Sachin RS Nomination - How media got it all wrong

At 1506hr yesterday rediff.com said:  "The Congress President is learnt to have talked in general about cricket and wished the player luck for his future" under the headline 

"15:06  Guess who came visiting Sonia? :  

Sachin Tendulkar along with his wife Anjali today paid a courtesy visit to
Congress President Sonia Gandhi at her 10 Janpath Residence in New Delhi. 
Sonia wanted to meet the batting great and personally congratulate him on achieving the historic feat of scoring 100 international centuries recently.

Senior BCCI functionary and IPL chairman Rajiv Shukla was also present at Sonia Gandhi's residence. Tendulkar and his wife spent close to half an hour with Sonia. The Congress President is learnt to have talked in general about cricket and wished the player luck for his future."

Suddenly at rediff.com learnt that what it had learnt was not correct and :

18:51  Batting maestro, yesteryear actress get RS call:   Just in: TV reports say Sachin has accepted the RS nomination. Confirmation awaited. Sachin, apparently, gave his OK to Sonia Gandhi, when he met her this morning.

Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political.

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let's assume that you're both nude, and you're erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

MAP OF THE DAY:

Wal-Mart's Invasion Of Mexico

Mischief Minister

West Bengal's populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in power in India

BUYER'S remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal's cultural hero, may come to regret their haste. Likewise, many who voted in last year's state election. Sickened by 34 years of wretched Communist rule, they handed power to Mamata Banerjee and her party, the Trinamool Congress. The sense of regret is palpable.

http://thedoghousediaries.com/

doghouse

The blame game

Batsmen will be batsmen and bowlers bowlers, and never the two shall see eye to eye

"Listen to him. He doesn't have to maintain concentration for hours on end, does he? Bowls six balls and has a rest. Bowls half a dozen overs and then has a kip at slip or long leg. Pops off the field to put his feet up every couple of hours and gets the twelfthy to do his work for him"

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The arrival of David Fincher's English-language version of Stieg Larsson's Scandinavian publishing phenomenon was greeted with as much shoulder-shrugging as anticipation.

Even in a landscape filled with the strip-mining of same-old source material (New Star Trek! New Superman! New Spider-Man, only five years after the last one!), why would one of Hollywood's brainiest auteurs accept the task of remaking a much admired local adaptation?

Iceland ex-PM Haarde 'partly' guilty over 2008 crisis

Former Icelandic PM Geir Haarde has been found not guilty of negligence over the 2008 financial crisis that saw the island's economy go into meltdown.

A special court in Reykjavik said Mr Haarde would face no punishment and his legal expenses would be paid for.

But he was found guilty of one of the four charges: not holding cabinet meetings when things turned critical.

Mr Haarde, 61, is thought to be the first world leader to face criminal charges over the financial crisis.

The mother who stood up to Monsanto in Argentina

When Sofia Gatica's 3-day-old daughter died from kidney failure, she didn't connect it with an environmental problem. It was only as she noticed neighbor after neighbor developing health problems that she started to wonder about the agrochemicals that were being sprayed on the farms nearby.

But thanks to the actions of this working-class mother, and the international movement she has built against Monsanto, things in Argentina are slowly changing. 

Poem of the week:

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale by John Skelton

Campaigners claim World Bank helps facilitate land grabs in Africa

Food shortages and rural deprivation exacerbated by World Bank policy, says NGO ahead of land and poverty conference

The World Bank is helping corporations and international investors snap up cheap land in Africa and developing countries worldwide at the expense of local communities, environment and farm groups said in a statement released on Monday to coincide with the bank's annual land and poverty conference in Washington DC.

'Right to Pee' for women

Activists in Mumbai have launched a campaign to demand better public toilet facilities for women

Book of the Day

In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those grueling months…

"Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother from cancer. Hiking the trail helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before.

"Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. Eventually she began to experience 'a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun,' meeting the few other hikers along the way, all male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor."

10 Poems

Here are 10 easy- to- remember poems courtesy Penguin USA.

Poems are meant to impress your friends in the National Poetry Month.

Is April the poetry month? Don't know. Before you Google to find this read the first one by "Jamesian," Thom Gunn

Their relationship consisted

In discussing if it existed.

Couch Surfing

The New Yorker has this huge article on couch-surfing. Couch Surfing is " the practice of temporarily lodging with a stranger—free of charge, unless you count being incessantly sociable as payment."

ExxonMobil - Big Bad Corporation

Steve Coll has a new book (Private Empire) on Exxon Mobil that details the power and influence this BIG corporation has on the lives of all things livings.




There is an article on the ExxonMobil from Steve Coll again in latest issue of The New Yorker which opens with the line "how ExxonMobil became a finance arm of the Republican Party."




Other notable lines from the same article are:






"ExxonMobil has focused its PAC donations on Republican legislators who can try to assure that no damaging laws go through"
"All of the corporation’s business strategies remain oriented toward the very long run. Decades from now, oil, gas, and coal, ExxonMobil’s analysts predicted, “will continue to be the most widely used fuels.”"






However, this line from an overview of the book at barnesandnoble.com takes the cake:






"In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy."