Have you ever sent an email late one night when you were sloshed… and you woke up the next morning and wished you hadn’t sent it? Let’s say you are drunk-soaked-to-the-bone. And you decide to email your ex/crush/boss/coworker/ENTIRE-OFFICE and tell something you wouldn’t want to tell when sober. Google kind of prevents that. By asking you a series of simple timed arithmetic questions. Just to make sure you are not drunk. Or stoned.

By default it is enabled on late Friday nights. But you can schedule it according to your drinking needs. For example, daily.

Guess what? A professor in my department told me about this!

I feel they should have this in cell phones and GPS devices as well. Just to save your life.

I have to mention here that this incident was very very mortifying for me. I was scared out of my wits and took a good 5 minutes to figure out what has happening.

It’s 1:00 AM and I am sound asleep on a sleeping bag in the living room. I am waken up by something getting knocked over in the kitchen. When I open my eyes I see a *thing* moving around on the carpet with a blinking green light.
It’s a *thing*, moving around on the carpet with a blinking green light.
Whenever it finds an obstacle like a furniture leg, it turns and sets off in another direction. Remember, it’s 1:00 AM and I have been woken up from my sleep. This is what goes through my (very sleepy) head -

1. It’s a robot. And it has been released by aliens.
2. Someone has broken into the house and has sent a life-form scanning device to scan for, well, life-forms.
3. It’s something else probably.
I am still trying to figure out what is going on – and also considered the possibility that someone was playing a prank on me. But who would play a prank on me at 1:00 AM? I mentally counted that figured that there are a good number of people who are likely to play a prank on me at 1:00 AM.
I am petrified. While the thing is still whirring away on the carpet, I summon the courage to switch on the nearest light, still keeping my eyes on that thing, because it was right next to me. The lights are on, and I look closely.

Oh dear god it’s a vacuum cleaner. A robotic one that is programmed to run at 12:02 AM every Sunday. And that thing had been running for a good hour before it woke me up.

I am still in a daze because of sleep and I think, I should just turn it over on its back so it could not move. Turned out it had a power button. I press that and it stays put.

**
Later in the wee hours of the morning I woke up time and again to make sure it had not moved again. It hadn’t.

It is currently rated as the #1 movie in IMDB.
Here’s some trivia that will keep you thinking.
**
I have seen it twice in the theaters this weekend.
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Also, The Prestige, directed by same director – Christopher Nolen is a movie worth watching!

A month back, this hilarious piece Vladimir Radyuhin appeared in The Hindu: Import Indian bridegrooms for Russian brides. To shift the population curve upwards. No, not kidding.

It is the new Russian magic mantra to reverse the alarming fall in the country’s birth rate. Pretty bold, huh? Says Maria Arbatova, writer and TV moderator, who married an Indian businessman a few years ago “after 25 years of keeping marrying Russians”, thinks Indian men make ideal husbands. “They are crazy about their family and children,” she said presenting her new book, ‘Tasting India’ in Moscow. “What is more, Indians, like Russians, are Indo-Europeans, and many Sanskrit and Russian words have the same roots.”

Russia has a population of 142 million spread across a territory five times the size of India. Its population is shrinking at one-third of a million a year. The government is trying lucrative methods to actually get couples to give birth to more babies – certificates worth $10,000 to second or subsequent children, monthly support payments etc. However, afraid that the Government measures are not enough, the Governor of Ulyanovsk suggested his own way. September 12th has been chosen as the new holiday, when Ulyanovsk residents will enjoy an extra day off work that the Governor decreed to give them more time to produce babies.

The holiday, officially called “Family Contact Day”, was quickly renamed by locals as “Day of Conception”. That day the people will be invited to join a festival, “I Love You”, while teams of gynaecologists, midwives and psychologists will fan out to all parts of the region to advise women on having babies.

Why September 12? So that babies conceived that day may be born on June 12, Russia’s National Day. Couples who hit the target date win prizes, including refrigerators, TV sets and washing machines. The main prize is an Ulyanovsk-built all-terrain vehicle called Patriot.

I don’t think there can be any greater or more glorious slip of the tongue than saying “I make out thrice a week” instead of “I work out thrice a week”.

And not realizing it for a while.

Ah, me.