All hail Prince Philip



You gotta love the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. I was reading through this Telegraph article, Around the world in 20 gaffes, when I saw that he had almost monopolized the list. Now I'd heard of his predisposition for political incorrectness earlier, so I went looking and found this: Relive 65 classic gaffes as Duke of Edinburgh celebrates 65th wedding anniversary

Click through for a jolly good time.

My favorites:
  • To Simon Kelner, republican editor of The Independent, at Windsor Castle reception: “What are you doing here?” “I was invited, sir.” Philip: “Well, you didn’t have to come.”
  • To female sea cadet last year: “Do you work in a strip club?”
  • To deaf children by steel band, 2000: “Deaf? If you’re near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
  • To a tourist in Budapest in 1993: “You can’t have been here long, you haven’t got a pot belly.”
  • To a woman solicitor, 1987: “I thought it was against the law for a woman to solicit.”
  • To then Paraguay dictator General Stroessner: “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.

Also, you might want to see this for a little more context on few of the quotes above. 

Also, the man was mighty handsome in his youth. You can see from where Prince William gets his genes. 


The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. -- V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Pale Blue Dot



Like so many other things Carl Sagan wrote, the world would be a much better place if people read and understood his immortal (at least to me) lines about the Pale Blue Dot.


From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Book Reviews: Sachin Tendulkar-A Definitive Biography

Sachin Tendulkar-A Definitive BiographySachin Tendulkar-A Definitive Biography by Vaibhav Purandare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

More like a chronological telling of Sachin's cricket history, starting from school. Lots of theories added to the mix, but I fail to see how they enhance the book in any manner. A dry read, for the most part. The best part of the book is that as you read it, you relive Sachin's boundaries, wickets and centuries in your mind!


View all my reviews