So last weekend was at a friends place , potluck , good food , vino, fun conversation, all in all a rather nice relaxed evening . Somewhere during the evening the conversation drifted to a variation on the freebie list ( see friends Season 3 ep 5 essentially list of people you get to sleep with without upsetting anyone ) this conversation was more like a, who’s on your all time hit parade list . Just about everyone's list was predictable and ok ( some surprises though someone bought up Liam Neeson and on some thought I have to say I agree )
Anyway in yet another sign that I am getting too old for most things, I was thinking later on that , at this point in my life what do I find really good looking . We all pay lip service to “beauty being in the eyes of the beholder”, so what do I behold as beauty” Now don't get me wrong a gorgeous derriere is clearly up there, but still what is sublime and transcendent to me !!. Here in no particular order, continuing my obsession with lists is a list of the truly beautiful
1) John Patrick McEnroe at Wimbledon serving , racing towards the net , his opponents return of serve clearly too good , and OMG a volley that defies the very laws of Physics. For those who are too young to have seen “The Tiebreaker” ( if you have to ask etc etc ) catch it on you tube or something but man John McEnroe was blessed in a way I have not seen since
2) This one is actually two people and there is a curious symmetry about it but Mohammed Azharuddin flicking a ball of his legs , all wrists and the fielders applaud ; the gods smile down and David Ivon Gower’s almost incredibly lazy and languid yet whipcord quick cover drive are truly amazing. I am an atheist, but if ever there was a POC for god it must be these two cricketing strokes. I remember watching Gower play as a kid for the first time and I could not believe anyone could hit it through the off side like that ( in later years Ganguly would come close to achieving that peculiar slow motion gracefulness that many left handed cover drives seem to have but there was only one David Gower) and Azza well I certainly cannot in prose do any justice to the magical flick of the wrist that would transform a full blooded swinging yorker into “that’s 4 more to Azharuddin”
c) Led Zeppelin: No one even comes close like none, maybe floyd and “the doors” but Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are for my money still the amazing producers of sound ever. “Going to california” and “Battle of Evermore” still remain amazing tunes
d) Boyer Moore : (Geeks only warning ) if you ask anyone in a interview how they would implement strstr ( searching one string within another ) 99% of people would give you the naive implementation in which basically you run two loops comparing letter by letter from SrchString and Text and if you miss then start over in the next position in Text. An alternative to this technique is the Boyer Moore search which is incredibly clever but even more interesting to me incredibly beautiful . I remember when I first read about Boyer Moore I literally wanted to jump up and down with joy at the sheer cleverness of this and als0 man thank god I work in an industry where something like this is possible ( shortly after that I continued to do my day job which was shipping Vista so never mind :-) ). The basic idea behind Boyer Moore is this . Say you are searching for the word “Hello” in the string :
Director Ken Annakin had been interested in aviation from his early years when Sir Alan Cobham gave him a flight in a biplane.
Now in the naive method you would first check if the first letters matched ( in other words you would check ‘H’ with ‘D’ ) The cleverness of BM is that, it is way faster to check the last letter. In other words you first check the fifth position in the Text ( thus comparing ‘C ‘with ‘O’ ) The point is if the last letter does not match there is no point in checking the previous letters there cannot be a match . There are complicated wrinkles, see wiki for details, but basically after checking the 5th I will check the 10th again for a ‘O’ because otherwise “Hello” can’t fit there again . Truly a testament to raw intellectual horsepower”
e) George Raymond Richard Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It will take too long to explain just read it already ( sic-fi fantasy warning :-) )
f) Kasparov-Karpov World championship Match 1985 ( this would be the first rematch :-) ) Game 16 --Sicilian Paulsen . The Kasparov–Karpov games in the 80’s remain to this day some of the best chess ever and Game 16 is a masterpiece .. again really hard to explain but a really really beautiful game , I have rarely seen such a beautiful game . Chess in general is a truly exquisitely beautiful game ( also can get real ugly sometimes :- )) but some games are like just an amazing trip on shrooms man!!!
g) Finally !! your dogs your kids ( under the age of 10 while they still listen :-) ) and the love of your life will always be beautiful , this is just the way it is :-) I still find my dogs gorgeous and as for my wife from the day I fell in love with her to today she remains gorgeous to me. Chances are pretty good she will be that way tomorrow as well :-)
Some other time : What is UGLY to me :-)
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