What an evening, and whatay performance. I caught the last Singapore show of We Will Rock You (also known as WWRY), a musical by Queen and Ben Elton, based on Queen songs. Just one word to describe the experience: mind-blowing (no, it’s not two words. It one hyphenated word).

The storyline, the cast, the history are all wiki-able. But the experience was beyond any live performance I’ve seen in perfection, fidelity, energy and the heavenly music. I am a huge fan of Queen, and this was a dynamite package that left me begging for more.

Brilliant performances by the live band, with almost all of Queen’s hits, and I couldn’t care less about the slightly below par story-line. The grand finale with ‘We will rock you’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘ performed as an encore played a fitting end to a tribute to one of the best rock bands ever.

Thank God I walked into the ticket counter at Orchard and bought the ticket on a last minute impulse. It’s been 2 days and my pod is still looping Queen songs :D

(And in case you are wondering, Galileo Figaro and Scaramoush are words from Bohemian Rhapsody and the names of lead characters in WWRY).

Imagine a situation where you are dumbfounded by a very simple question, that too in front of a million people. Something even a kid with basic education could have answered. What does one do in such an embarrassing position? Grin and bear the shame, and try to learn better or get booed by the audience, or get thrown out of a job? And what happens when a nation has many such illiterates who need immediate re-education? Do you raise a nation-wide alarm and focus all energies on re-jigging your education system?

Hell NO. One makes a TV Show out of it. Called ‘Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader?’, where adults with fully developed brains are stumped by questions that 10 year olds have answered even before the question is finished. And then you coolly walk away with 50 grand in your pocket for accepting that you are, in fact, not smarter than a fifth grader.

The first time I saw it was when I was flipping channels and the ‘#1 game show in American TV’ caught my attention. And when I saw a woman wrong guessing which hemisphere North America was in (to be corrected by a 9 year old and win 10 grand or so in the process), I lost it. And it was when she had no shit clue about the question ‘if y=4x and 4x=12 then what is y?’ that I had an epiphany. Now I know why the ‘idiot box’ is called so.

In India, not knowing that piece of ultra-basic Algebra would mean your sweet ass being whooped by parents and teachers alike. And hell, it’s not even education, it’s basic common sense. Then, I notice that we seem to celebrating dumbness a hell lot. Fear Factor, where one eats worms and gulps ostrich eggs; Fist of Zen, where one has to smell burps for 30 seconds and what not; videos of really dumb people (more so Japanese humor) topping the charts in Youtube; a worrying trend I say.

Humor being dumb, slapstick and brainless is one thing. But brainlessness being considered normal, and even worth creating mass entertainment out of, is plain artlessness (in both senses of the word).

After I shut down the tele, I put on the radio for some musical and not-so-dumb entertainment. And there I was ambushed by another show called ‘Anything also can’. Let me explain. That’s Singlish for ‘anything goes’, or ‘everything is correct’. So in this show, all one needs to do is call up, give some random, totally unconnected answer, and win a prize.

And the kicker, that took away my faith in whatever was left in human intelligence, is that one lady called, and couldn’t answer a question on the show for 2 whole minutes. A show where she could’ve just said ‘I’m uber-dumb’ and still won the prize. But nope.

I expect too much from people, I’m told. Sigh.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Bono, well known as the lead singer of U2 and as an activist. For the first time, I have seen someone explain, very lucidly, how Africa is not about charity. And how one can make a difference.

Forceful, eloquent, well thought of, well researched, and the best fucking 10 minutes I have ever heard from a rock star.

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Pretty plugin. And damn useful. Its a shame I didn’t discover this before.

ScribeFire adds loads of functionality to the Firefox browser, for all bloggers. Publishing posts on the go is a breeze, and categories and past entries are also easily manipulated.

Find the plugin here.

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Elliot (n.): The small cardboard cartons that people always carry when they move offices. (And not air-bags, plastic bags, shoulder bags, cloth bags, hell, not even paper bags). Can also refer to the mysterious place where one gets these cartons from.

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Every time I think what more can people do, to creatively bring a win-win, there is one more brilliant marketing insight that falls plum onto my lap.

For the uninitiated, CAPTCHA is the oddly designed scramble text and numbers that one has to enter for verification on websites; to prevent auto-scripts and email-bots from entering / registering / creating accounts / running DoS attacks etc. While we usually land the boring gibberish on login and register pages, some guy actually thought of using that mindspace for advertising brand names; capturing valuable attention, and also making the user repeat it in his/her mind for filling in the web form. Seth Godin also covers this in his blog.

As users are very likely to read and type the CAPTCHA text, some people are suggesting to commercial this cryptic graphic. See good examples from Jean Yves.

Brilliant!

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It is true. Pain brings out the poet in everyone. Poignancy is an emotion of being bereft, not of abundance. The best heartfelt lines speak of loves lost and sacrifices that worshiped an ingrate.

Each one of us is a story waiting to be told, and some of us are already writing our own screenplays for the retrospective grand finale. Each one of us is a brand screaming for attention, a 30 second advert about all that’s best in us. Each one of us is a legacy waiting to be handed over, once the acting is done with. Like some old manuscript from the past, that lives only in words, ideas and visuals.

Each one of us is nothing but a collection of memories. It is up to us to give those memories enough meaning that we don’t feel a life wasted when we, or for that matter, others, look back at us.

Don’t worry about petty things in life too much. We aren’t getting out alive anyways, and decades aren’t as long as they seem to be.

Daily dose of comics: Brevity, Dilbert, Pearls before swine, Wizard of Id, BC, Peanuts. Check.
Seth Godin’s blog, Dilbert blog, Boing Boing, Freakonomics Blog. Check.
2 episodes of Scrubs. Check.
Geek inspiration from DI Blog, Engadget. Check.
Brand matters from PSFK and Remarkable Communication. Check.
The daily post at www.harishnarayanan.com.

Check :)