July 01, 2009
On the D.L.
The Dalai Lama's a shifty one.
I arrived to Dharamsala with little hope of seeing His Holiness. Already this year, he abruptly canceled his annual March teachings due to poor health & probable international engagements with Richard Gere. With a busy schedule of whipping around the world or bopping around to various parts of India, the D.L. calls the Hyatt as much home as his modest mountain palace in Dharamsala. One wonders the kind of frequent flier miles His Holiness racks up and whether he claims these all-expenses-paid trips on his income taxes. I would safely assume that he, like the rest of us, cooks the books a pinch.
To counter mother nature's cruelly cursing me with unadulterated man-boobs, lady luck bestowed upon me a once in a lifetime chance at a face to face encounter with the Nobel laureate himself! He happened to be in town for a few days to give a talk to the Tibetan students in the area. Something about the 37 somethings of the Bodhisattvas... Who cares!? I was going to see the Tibetan rebel numero uno in the flesh!
My attempt to obtain tickets for indoor seating for the 2 day event were rebuffed so instead I did what any devoted Buddhist would do: relentlessly stalk him at the place his motorcade & entourage (including bodyguards, handlers, sycophants, well-wishers, et.al.) would deposit him.
Mission accomplished. And to boot, I nearly touched him, before a bodyguard swiftly deflected my clammy open palm out of His Holiness' middle path.
Posted by thejerk at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 29, 2009
Toons by Lunchbreath
In my absence, I've kept myself rather busy scouring the ol' ISH (information super-highway) to bring you godless heathens more and more educational and/or rewarding content. As of 11:21pm last night, I reached the end of the internet and I'm ready to begin posting my findings. (In case you were wondering, no, I wasn't at all being lazy and neglecting this site in favor of my photolicious new website: Daily Travel Photos.)
Pull up a chair, you trust fund babies and unemployed goat herders. Enjoy yerself some witty cartoons:
mo' after the jump
Continue reading "Toons by Lunchbreath"
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May 14, 2009
Wish I had a daughter like that
more at http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/
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May 08, 2009
Heavy Sack
In case anyone out there's wondering what's in my cumbersome backpack whilst I do what I do, here's a photo:
Click through to the Flickr Page to see the version with labels on all my gear.
My rucksack and photography backpack cumulatively weigh around 35kg which is about 77lbs for all you imperialists out there. This tremendous load isn't doing any favors for my herniated disks and gonorrheal pubis but a true artist suffers for his craft, no? And yes, that really is a prosthetic thumb... Why do I have a prosthetic thumb, you ask? Why not is my reply.
I hope to have a photo of a fully packed bag at some point in the future so stay tuned.
Posted by thejerk at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 05, 2009
Locate me
This'll probably make some of you privacy freaks out there, er, freak.
It's Google latitude showing my exactly location at any point in time. Unfortunately I don't update latitude automatically by mobile phone but instead manually plug in my coordinates whenever I remember. The "detect my location by ISP" update option is absolute shite - which always puts me in downtown Palo Alto, California - so the manual option is all I have.
As of right now, I'm undecided on permanently sticking this thing in the left sidebar but it's about time I retire that crappy blue "where am i" globe over there.
If you've been to India, you learn to live with little to no privacy. As a result, I won't lose any sleep over such silly self-aggrandizing concerns. If someone has so little in his life that he's actually thinking of stalking me, he has far greater issues than me. Frankly, I could use the company so I welcome any of my mentally imbalanced readers to come find me. Currently, I'm in the greater Chennai metro area in India. Swing by. We'll have a masala chai and hurl insults at the natives.
Posted by thejerk at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 02, 2009
Male Perspective
A tourist map of Bijapur, India reveals the commonly held view of Western women by the average Indian man.
To be fair, it'd be appropriate to also show an illustration of a guy in a banana hammock, no?
If given the chance, everyone's a whore.
Posted by thejerk at 02:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 17, 2009
Back in the Saddle Again
After 6 months of excrutiating boredom and withstanding bitter winter weather waiting for weddings in America, I'm finally back where I belong: living the life of a godless, wandering gypsy with a penchant for diet cola beverages. Scanning the upcoming television lineup, I feel I left America not a minute too soon. A reality TV show about the debatably interesting lives of Jockeys (of the horse variety) was near its premiere, a clear indication in my mind that studio executives have exhausted all viable programming ideas. In retrospect, it should've become evident to me when the 16th faux-judge program filled the coveted 1:30-2:00 mid-afternoon timeslot or when every other show title contained at least one of the following words: experiment, project, chronicles, diaries, confessions. For all of us that grew up in the 80's, there is and always will be one daytime judge that doles out hot justice with a side of sass - Wopner be thy name.
6 months of mind-numbing torpor and unbridled food overconsumption has left my once-magnificent body pushing the 200 lbs boundary, a shameful 40 lbs over my 1976 "Mr. Metropolitan Pyongyang" pageant weight. During this wedding waiting period, I was confined to my childhood home where daily movement was strictly limited to a range of motion that encompassed a 20 foot radius from my room to the kitchen and the bathroom (necessarily in that order). This inactivity has rendered my muscles in an advanced state of atrophy and induced the newest of my diagnosed diseases - cello scrotum. Cello scrotum is yet another concocted rich-world disease in which the pressure of a cello causes irreparable harm to the testes. The mystery is, I've never played the cello in my life but now we know, you can contract this disease by sitting around eating potato chips in your underwear watching Sex in the City reruns.
The downtime at home, however, wasn't a complete waste. Besides taking care of some long overdue medical issues, I caught up on my facebook and twitter reading but most importantly, I've finally launched my new website:
My photography was unintentionally encroaching on this website's jerkiness so I finally decided to separate the two. Jerks & rapscallions form a line over here, travel photography fans over there... religious fanatics, you'll have to wait until early 2010 (www.DefaultingToMindlessFaithBasedExplanations.edu). On Daily Travel Photos, as the name implies, I'll release one new photo each day at 10pm Eastern Time. Your drooling promptly ensues at 10:01pm.
And although not yet implemented, I plan to slowly rewrite all of my award-winning thejerk.org content and I may even use proper punctuation and grammar this time. However, if you're expecting an overhaul of the site's juvenile humor, don't hold your breath. By rewriting/rewording my past stories, I hope to eliminate filth-seeking google referrals as identified by the top 10 keywords that arrived at thejerk.org:
Continue reading "Back in the Saddle Again"
Posted by thejerk at 06:55 AM | Comments (2)