Received this email today:

The subject line? **JUNK**
My spam filter has surprisingly good taste.
Previously: ‘Five Point Someone’, Beware Indian mass-market fiction

‘Mal De Mer’ by Rupa & the April Fishes is a free download for Zune owners this week, whch probably has something to do with it being April.
Zune focuses on indies because iPod has locked up the mainstream MP3 player market. It’s odd positioning for a behemoth like Microsoft. It’s also a funny switcheroo with […]

Courtesy of angermann

As lightweight e-ink screens like the Sony Reader become more popular, publishers are starting to think about how to crack down on pirated books online. These aren’t the 200-rupee, hastily photocopied titles sold at Bombay traffic signals. These are the books themselves boiled down to their essence, denuded of pretty fonts and layout, […]

[Guitar Hero developer] Harmonix… was so enamored with the “Sitar Hero” parody poster (with Apu playing a 60-button sitar controller) that they asked for 20 copies. [Link]
Please note that Sitar Hero is considerably more difficult than Guitar Hero. And the wah-wah doesn’t come from a pedal. It’s some kid paid in chai and sonf.
Here’s another […]

Here’s what Google Suggest thinks people are searching on when you type the phrase ‘Indians are’:

Naturally, it’s been Googlebombed

The blog was attacked Monday afternoon by an automated script which used a WordPress 2.1 security hole to add prescription drug ads and random text to some of the posts, and prevented other posts from being created or edited. The ads pointed to a server, brokensaints.com, which itself may have been hacked. Lesson: stay up-to-date […]

Check out this ode to Scrabulous, set to Fergie’s ‘Glamorous‘:

I’m hoping Hasbro resolves their copyright dispute with the Agarwallas sensibly. The Scrabulous developers are either copyright pirates or innovators in the mold of Napster and the movie industry, which landed on the West Coast to escape movie camera patents back east:
Edison and his partners […]

The San Francisco Zoo where Tatiana the tiger mauled a teen to death reportedly had an under-height tiger fence because of an Indian urban legend:
… the enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo was only 12 1/2 feet tall. That height, Willis said, can perhaps be traced to an age-old confidence in India, where tigers are […]

Six months after a disastrous engine explosion, Scaled Composites showed off mockups of SpaceShipTwo today. You’d think for $200K, you’d get a better view during your 4½ minutes of weightlessness:

Pakistani-Dubaikar poet and astrologer Namira Salim will be one of the first average Jamilas to rocket into suborbit:

Namira Salim is set to become the […]

Here’s a screenshot from the Vortex game which comes with the new iPod Nano. Surely the level designer was familiar with the centerpiece of the Indian flag?
Related posts: iWait for the next iPhone, The second coming of the Jesus phone, California and Powell, Biting the Big Brown Apple, iHippie

When I first came to this country as a kid, I loved my dad’s stick-shift Toyota. It cost $3,000 in ’70s dollars and seemed unbelievably luxurious after the norm of five sardines on a Bajaj. I used to sneak in at night, admire the blue lights on the dashboard and inhale the perforated vinyl steering […]

Matthew McConaughey schools Bill Gates in lifting and meditation in this spoof from CES (at 1:08). The sitar is reveille for Bill’s final six months as a full-time Microsoft employee. Malaria isn’t going to cure itself, ya know.

Other celebs in the roast: Jon Stewart, Bono, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Jon Heder, George Clooney, […]

‘Desi’ has just been added to the only dictionary you use several times a day, the one on your cell phone. The makers of T9 predictive texting have just added their first mixed-language, Hinglish dictionary for phrases like ‘chai,’ ‘desi’ and ‘kya re, saala? apun tapori nahin (What’s up, dickhead? I’m not your stooge.)’ […]

Here’s Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist on the Sony Reader, which is much tinier in real life than photos would suggest. It’s thinner and lighter than your average paperback, and sexy in silver:

The Sony is much sleeker than the clunky Amazon Kindle, but you have to sync its 160-book capacity manually, there’s no wireless. The […]

Check out our new application on Facebook. You can share your blog comments with friends:

Here’s what you do:

Add the application
Click ‘more’ in the left sidebar and click
Type your commenter name, including spaces if any, and click Save

That’s it! Now come back here and leave a comment.

Samoan-Kiwi-American graffiti artist Iosefatu Sua created this mashup of Krishna, kali and thangka. It’s available as one of several laser etchings on the back of a customized Zune 80, which WinSuperSite thinks is better than the iPod Classic and Touch:

… the Zune 80 blows the iPod classic out of the water. It offers a vastly […]

The visual style of Nina’s Sita Sings the Blues is hypnotic in part because of the metronomic regularity of its lines, from the sinusoidal waves to the microchip rain . It reminds me of wide-eyed manga faces, Web comics like Demian 5

Here’s a rundown of some of the desi lit on tap at Amazon’s Kindle ebook store, and what’s not available yet:

Author
Book
Ebook?

Salman Rushdie
Shalimar the Clown

Y

Fury

Y

Step Across This Line

Y

Midnight’s Children

N

The Satanic Verses

N

The Moor’s Last Sigh

N

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

N

In Blade Runner: The Final Cut, the 25th anniversary edition of that seminal film, little-known indie director Ridley Scott (A Good Year, Black Rain) uses yellow panic to convey a dystopian future. Impenetrable Chinese and kanji ideographs and Arabic vocals from the Brian Eno track ‘Quran’ signify a future where Earth is crumbling, most have […]

The new events tab lets you post plays, book readings, concerts, parties and so on.
This is a huge time-saver: Click the icon to add the event (with time, location and description) right into your schedule.

When your browser asks, choose Open. Your calendar will show the appointment — just click the Save button.
For Google, choose […]