guess who's back...

Dear readers,

It's been a while. Much has changed since my last post, both for me personally and in all the spheres where I usually target my commentary. Often in this period, I've come across something and thought, "Ooh, I should blog about that," and then not had the time or the energy. But here I am again, at your service.

Let's get some of the backlog out of the way before I start writing in real time again, as it were. Pakistan is, for want of a better analogy, going through another serious contraction in its ongoing quest to birth a solid identity. A comment on my previous post wondered why I hadn't written about the law minister debacle. I get depressed when I read this stuff, and even more so when I talk about it, so I will let it be what it is, and stick to the lighter stuff from which I have carved my niche here on billu.net.

Which brings me to another dilemma. For lighter stuff, I often resort to writing about cricket, which, over the last two months, has produced a string of news that is anything but 'light'. My last post was on the first day of the World Cup. Now the tournament is over, and there are many things to be depressed about. But to shy away from even these would be akin to resorting to a blend of journalistic laziness and cowardice. So here comes a series, in chronological order, of my World Cup woes:

Bob Woolmer's Death
Pakistan's Exit
Administrative Mishaps
Aussies Whining About Lankans
Lankans Whining About Aussies
Cricket's Identity Crisis

Hopefully this will give me a nice segue into a regular routine.

oranges and lemons

A common motivational statement goes something like this: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Turns out, you could also make the Taj Mahal. Or that big Jesus statue that sits on the cliff above Rio de Janeiro.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the Fête du Citron, an annual festival on the French Riviera in which people get together and make gigantic sculptures out of oranges and lemons. It's all pretty fantastic.

It also gives me a chance to post about something that makes me happy, to silence all you "billu.net is too angry" folks. You know who you are.





It also makes me think of a recent post by 4e44. How the heck do you find out that you have the uncanny ability to make sculptures out of citrus fruit? Is it discovered by your parents when you're young? "That billu, he's good with his hands, he's going to grow up to be a famous orange sculptor."

I wish. All my poor parents could say was: "That billu, all he'll ever be good for is writing a blog detailing how everything in life pisses him off."

Well, billu.net may fall short of the proverbial lemonade, but it's the best I can do with my lemons.

adnan siddiqi is a choot

Some of you may have noticed that I cross-post my cricket posts on cricket.bloggers.pk, a sort of combined forum for Pakistani cricket bloggers to get better outreach for their posts.

Well, I recently posted michael holding is a choot there, and here is a comment I received from a fellow named Adnan Siddiqi.

"Your voice could be heard if you had no't (sp) prefered (sp) to choose censored words. I hope you can make a difference between a personal blog and a collabrative (sp) forum?

thanks"

First of all, I didn't prefer to choose "censored" words. No words in my post were censored. Mr. Siddiqi would like for some of them to have been, but they were not.

In any case, I recently wrote about the differences between the real argument for free speech and the not-so-important argument about being able to do whatever you want for no reason whatsoever. Well, here's an example of the former.

I am not asking Mr. Siddiqi to read my articles, and I am not certainly not asking his opinion on them. God knows I have a painful time trudging through his overlong posts to edit them. He does, however, get 100 times the hits I do, so he's probably doing something right... But that's not the point.

I also noticed that he has a link on his blogroll to a site called "Fucked Company." I can only assume he endorses this site. So my guess is that Mr. Siddiqi has one of two problems:

1. It is fine to cuss in English, but the word 'choot' is particularly offensive.

2. There is a difference between posting on billu.net and cricket.bloggers.pk.

Of course, he mentions that it's the latter, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that if I had merely substituted for an English term (say, 'pussy'), it would not be quite as much of a problem. In fact, I have written some pretty nasty things in English on cricket.bloggers.pk that seem to have gone unnoticed, which is a particularly disturbing double standard.

As for the second point, I will admit that for a while I was hesitant to post darrell hair is a choot pt. 2 in its entirety on cricket.bloggers.pk, but more out of respect for the creator of the site (Teeth Maestro) than anything else. But Mr. Maestro went on to express disappointment that I had censored the post, since he is a true champion for free speech. Add to this the fact that I am one of the three official site editors, and I set about the task of expressing my opinions in most unbridled fashion.

It may be a collaborative forum, but it is still a forum for free expression, and I should be able to use whatever words I wish, as long as I talk about cricket. That's what makes it interesting. If everyone expressed their thoughts in a predetermined template, there wouldn't be much point in collaborating, would there?

"Don't block the blog" is the word on the street among Pakistani bloggers. Well, don't temper the blog either, I say. Otherwise everyone's blogs will start sounding like tepid, watered down drivel...

chooting my own horn

It has been brought to my attention that people enjoy my crudeness here on billu.net. In particular, they seem to enjoy my use of the word "choot." How do I know this? Well, for one, my Darrell Hair is a Choot pt. 2 post was a hit. Teeth Maestro, among others, lauded it for the "pure, untamed quality" of my style. Others called it "angry", "caustic", "brilliant", and "a bit too much".

Well, maybe not "brilliant"... But still.

Another, more interesting, way in which I made this discovery was via good old Google Analytics, which tells me that 14% of billu.net's visitors over the past week found it by googling the keyword 'choot.'

This is both amusing and disturbing. Turns out billu.net is the 15th item returned by Google in a 'choot' search. Over time, I hope to improve this rank.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term 'choot,' it is an Urdu/Hindi cussword on par with, say, 'asshole.' Literally, it is the word for a woman's... um.. thang.

For those of you unfamiliar with my above usage of the term 'thang,' it means 'vagina.'

In any case, to satisfy both of these newly emerged target markets (choot seekers as well as untamed quality enthusiasts) I have decided to begin a series of posts titled "...is a choot." In this series, I will direct my wrath at people whom I deem to be bastards/idiots of the highest order, worthy of a post all their own.

Fans of billu.net will know that compiling such a list should not be a particularly difficult task for me.

----
Note: Readers of Omar Loves Cricket and King Cricket may recognize my newfound penchant for a series of posts as mildly derivative. Some of these readers may then scoff at my lack of originality. These readers can fuck off.

why so crabby?

Somebody has left the following comment on last Monday's post:

"this is a crab site there is no picz"

Needless to say, I am distraught at the quality of readers my site is attracting...

(It's okay if they're reading this - I deliberately used big words like 'distraught' and 'quality' so they wouldn't understand.)

if looks could kill

Fans will notice (if they are still reading) that billu.net has a new look! Big up to our friends at 4e44 for helping us out with this. Finally, an orange theme that works!

a milestone

Dear readers,

Today is a momentous day indeed. In addition to being Google's 8th birthday and my mother's 58th, today also officially marks the one-month anniversary of billu.net's first post!

(Fans will notice I am not counting the "test post" that was put up two days earlier.)

So 31 days, 36 posts, and counting...

disappointed fans

It appears I have gathered a loyal readership. (if you switch the l and r in "loyal readership", you get "royal leadership". Which means Chinese people must confuse their writers and their monarchs).

Of course, I hate nothing more than to read the pleas of disappointed fans. Unfortunately, I have been very busy of late, what with having to get a higher education and all. So, at the risk of losing readership, then, let me leave you with a promise that by the end of this day you will have at least one new post. I assure you there is much to talk about.

Till then...

dog's blog

So Omar has been posting on his blog all this time. I thought it was being neglected. Here are his two cents on the whole Pakistan Miss Bikini story I posted about a couple weeks ago.

two hundred hits

My blog has just hit 200 hits...

Of course, 175 of them are mine, but who's counting...

here it is

Yo. This is my blog.