Another gripping flash game. Paintball allows you to flex your creativity, creating surfaces for a ball the bounce across, the goal being to guide it to a red square. The regular laws of physics apply, and the simulation is very well done. Of course, there are many ways to solve each level, and sometimes you can just forget the goal and have fun playing with the ball!

I’ve got a new craze - writing limericks. Here are two limericks to start with (of course, read at your own risk)…

This is when I offered to write a short poem, and my friends shrieked in protest.

Don’t say no to my poem
Or I’ll retire to my ashram
There I’ll meditate
From morning till late
And emerge with an epic wholesome!

And this one is for my friend who has just arrived in London, and is eagerly waiting to experience a snowfall..

She wishes for it to snow
Just sitting in her condo
So afraid she’ll miss it
She’s sitting like a dimwit
With her nose to the window

It was about a month ago when a Dutchman in Amsterdam felt that he needed to confess, so went to his priest. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. During WWII I hid a Jew in my attic.”

“Well,” answered the priest, “that’s not a sin.”

“But I made him agree to pay me 20 Gulden for every week he stayed.”

“I admit that wasn’t good, but you did it for a good cause.”

“Oh thank you Father; that eases my mind. Er, I have one more question…”

“What is that, my son?”

“Do I have to tell him the war is over?”

This is without doubt one of the best optical illusions I have ever come across. Look at the girl and see which way, clockwise or anticlockwise (counterclockwise, if you like), she’s spinning. It can actually be interpreted in both ways. See how long it takes you to see her go both ways.
Source: this article.

This one is very simple, but fun nevertheless…

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Sciences, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story…

On March 23 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the decedent would not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide because of this…

Ordinarily a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands…

Further investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking the decedent.

When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. The old man was confronted with this conclusion, but both he and his wife were adamant in stating that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. It was the longtime habit of the old man to threaten his wife with an unloaded shotgun. He had no intent to murder her; therefore, the killing of the decedent appeared then to be accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded…

But further investigation turned up a witness that their son was seen loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal accident. That investigation showed that the mother (the old lady) had cut off her son’s financial support, and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that the father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus…

Further investigation revealed that the son became increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to get his mother murdered. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a 9th story window.

The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

Original article here.

I don’t know if these are true, but they make an amusing read in any case. I originally found these on this page.

• The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.
• Police in Wichita, Kansas, arrested a 22-year-old man at an airport hotel after he tried to pass two (counterfeit) $16 bills.
• A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain.
• Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.
• Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message “He’s lying” was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn’t telling the truth. Believing the “lie detector” was working, the suspect confessed.
• Mike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie in 1983 on the dangers of low-level bridges when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge — killing him.
• Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh. Each was guiding his car at a snail’s pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren’t scratched.
• George Schwartz, owner of a factory in Providence, R.I., narrowly escaped death when a 1983 blast flattened his factory except for one wall. After treatment for minor injuries, he returned to the scene to search for files. The remaining wall then collapsed on him, killing him.

Find more here..

Karwar is a town in Karnataka, very close to the Goa border. My family hails from a small village, Sadashivgad, based on the outskirts of Karwar. Rabindranath Tagore described Karwar as the ‘Kashmir of South India’, alluding to the beauty of its lush greenery and amazing beaches. (Personally, I think what cemented his love for the place was the incredible variety of fresh fish available in the local markets )

Here are some pictures I shot in Karwar (including my ancestral house and our cat).