Although I've been off the radar for some time, I've still been traveling but concentrating the majority of my massive talents & muscularity to my other website. Nonetheless, I'll half-ass this site until I can drive it permanently into the ground and offend the greater internet viewing population or die trying. Until then, enjoy the following photos I took with my inferior point and shoot camera (Canon SD1000) earlier this year.

click here for India pictures

In case you didn't notice, I snuck in some unannounced photos on thejerk.org at the end of 2008... so I'm announcing them now. Look at them, enjoy them, love them but please, for the love of gods, do not surreptitiously masturbate to my photos.

Sri Lanka part 1
Sri Lanka part 2

With a head that size, no matter what animal you are, you're bound to be adorable. But more importantly, with a head this big, you're unable to right yourself from a fallen position.

So what's more important to you? Being adorable or the ability to stand upright after a fall? There are no right or wrong answers... except in this case. The right answer is to be adorable... then someone will help you after you've fallen. If you're ugly, no one will come within a few feet of you.

What's wrong w/ this situation?

hit the jump for the answer

The Sunday market on Residency Rd in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Strangely enough, the shirt is for the Livingston Lancers, my neighboring town's high school, half a globe away. Surely one of those upper middle class mothers sent this donation in to assuage her guilt at living an wasteful and unsustainable lifestyle. The town's full of rich people, you see. Joke's on her though... someone's hijacked the donated shipment to make a quick profit and the rich mom's karma is unaffected because the shirt didn't end up on the back of the needy.

Lose-lose, all around! (except for the unscrupulous hijacker. he gets off pretty well at the end of the day)

Nothing's more refreshing than a Stalin Hitler... cigarette.

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.

Pull up a chair, you trust fund babies and unemployed goat herders. Enjoy yerself some witty cartoons:

mo' after the jump

more at http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

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.

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.

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.

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:

www.dailytravelphotos.com.

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:

the town somewhere in the northeast of India between Siliguri and Guwahati. i'll let your filthy minds fill in a wishfully lascivious meaning of "behar".

http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/

unless i can find a wealthy donor in my audience, i need to quickly get $2700 cash with my latest kidnap for ransom scheme.

donors: save one hapless victim the suffering and humiliation of being held for ransom by thejerk. make checks payable to "the jerk" (paypal and diner's club accepted).