I got my learner’s license (the driver’s license you need to get a real driver’s license) yesterday. While it probably will be a little useful (at the most) in the two weeks before I leave, I don’t think it’s worth the time, the effort, and the lunch that I sacrificed to obtain it. I spent nearly six hours at that cesspool they euphemistically call the Road Transport Association, paid a guy who was assigned by my driving school to help me out a thousand rupees, and had a police officer voluntarily take my written test. There were only three steps in obtaining the license: 1. Submitting the application; 2. Having your photograph taken; 3. Taking the written test. It amazes me that the process took six hours despite that. An hour had never felt so much like an hour before. That I went half a day without food or water reminded me unpleasantly of some of the more primitive Hindu rituals, and that nothing short of a ritual would get you what you want from the government of this country. A parasitic bank slave (and I don’t really know what he else he could be called) sent my dad a long, circuitous text message that contained the following sentence: “Profit is in the West, but growth is in the East.” Obviously, by “the East” he meant India; and unless he was referring to malignant tumors, I don’t know what he could possibly have meant.
The latest Bleach filler arc is a trillion times more interesting and worth your while than the current manga arc. So if you find yourself with a lot of free time and an inexplicable urge to watch Bleach, visit BleachGet.Com. They have every Bleach episode to date. It’s a useful website, considering YouTube has of late become more stringent in enforcing copyright laws. The storyline is rather similar to that of the Nintendo DS game – Dark Souls – in that the main enemy is a group of mod souls that tries to replace the Soul Reapers of the Gotei 13. There’s a deeper plot and a greater evil in the filler, though. I will end this paragraph before I’m too tempted to reveal the finer points of the plot, and say that whoever is making these filler arcs should continue to do so. Kubo Tite’s imagination has deserted him.
I wonder if animals can make associations. I taught the dogs the command “Go” – meaning, Go into the garage – back when we had Archie, and needed to lock the dogs up when we had visitors. After we gave Archie away, I never had to use that command. I wonder if, hearing it now, Asterix would be reminded of Archie. I call out Archie’s name occasionally in front of Asterix, and look for a reaction, but he doesn’t show any. Maybe he doesn’t understand; maybe he doesn’t know how to express a reaction; maybe he doesn’t want to; or maybe he really has forgotten Archie.
I found a very interesting article on the Internet about American and British accents. Being an amateur orthoepist, or someone who arrogates to himself that glorified description, I found it very interesting. It seems that British accents diverged more from those of the 18th century than did American accents. In the eighteenth century, Americans and Britons naturally sounded the same, and naval officers on both sides had a hard time telling a British sailor from an American in the impressment controversies of the 1790s. After the American Revolution, when the British returned to England, the upper classes began to fashion non-rhotic accents for themselves. When Americans returned to England in the early 1800s, they were surprised at the change in fashionable pronunciation. So British accents really do have their origins in snootiness and vainglory, which is not necessarily bad or good.
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