Life's a Beach

In case you didn’t know already, we Pakistanis like to do things differently to the rest of the world. Our talk show billboards feature men who look like walruses instead of women who look like models. Our overpriced lawn exhibitions have larger stampedes than the Harrods sale. Our wedding guest lists feature not only people we have not met in ages, but also people we actively dislike. And, more and more often, we go to the seaside, not for the beach, but for the hut. 

Talk Show Promo, Pakistani Style. Seriously though, who is this guy, and what is his deal?



This stampede is to buy clothes at full (over)price. Go figure.



In the rest of the world, people have residences on the beach, where they live, or run boutique hotels. Not so here. In Pakistan, we have huts on the beach. A lucky few own their own, and the rest rent, steal or borrow theirs. Top companies (and clandestine government agencies too, allegedly) have their own dedicated hut as a management perk, often booked months in advance. And there are gated hut communities, where entry is as restricted as the best beachside residences anywhere else.

The best huts, the coveted ones, have their own power supply, running water, air conditioning, and other mod-cons. Others are no more than a weatherbeaten exoskeleton with a roof and the obligatory verandah. And just like having a Neelam Colony right next to a Zamzama is perfectly natural, so too can two such huts be right next to each other, awami yang cheek-by-jowl with elitist yin.

The quality of the hut can often determine whether your beach plan will be a resounding success or an unequivocal failure. People have been known to feign a relative’s terminal illness to skip work just because a prominent FMCG’s hut was up for grabs, while others have been ‘called away for urgent work’ at the mere smell of the musty cane sofa in Munnoo uncle’s one-room wonder. In fact, some people will often ask which stretch of beach a hut is on, and which multinational owns it, before committing to turn up.

The reason for this is not the mere fact that our beaches are undeveloped and there are no facilities around. In the ‘good old days’ (you know the ones, when children spoke to their elders with respect, there was not so much fuhaashi on TV and party slims was the only junk food around), our aunts and uncles were not that bothered about whether the hut had satellite TV or not, but a hut there had to be. And if not a hut, at least the gatekeeper at the French Beach could be given a bit of pocket money to let us use the verandah of an unoccupied hut. After all, you don’t need changing rooms when your swimming costume is the shalwaar kameez you arrived in and scheduled to be your attire on departure to boot.

So why the insistence on the hut? There are a couple of practical reasons. 90% of Pakistanis, male or female, are afraid of all animals, male or female, that are not already on their plate. As a result, the raised surface of the hut provides a useful barrier between themselves and the dogs, horses, mongeese, camels, killer jellyfish, known locally as “blue bottles”, and other citizens of our beaches. 

A Karachi beach, complete with flora, fauna and beach huts of all description

Secondly, it is vital for our aunties to have a place where they can sequester their daughters of marriageable age, lest they spend the entire day in the sun and turn their skin black as coal, hence ruining their chances of landing any suitable match completely. After all, the dusky hued Bollywood bombshells adorning lawn billboards all over the city are not exactly the Pakistani aunties’ idea of suitable bahu material.



Also, on an emotional note, we need a hut because there are key components of a day at the beach that cannot be accomplished without it. Principal among these is the eating of the pateela of biryani / qeema on melamine plates while seated on a dastarkhwaan. Also featuring prominently is the exchange of gossip, resolution of old feuds, initiation of new ones and making of matches by ladies of a certain age. What remains eternally endearing though is the aunties’ beseeching of the young brigade to stay away from the water, and loud chants to invoke the Almighty’s help in keeping the clan safe for the day from the wrath of the waves after their inevitable refusal to comply.

Also vital in the beach experience is the hurling of imprecations at the youngsters for dragging sand on to the verandah floor. We are probably the only nation where people go to the beach for the day, but refuse to have anything to do with the sand. Like I said earlier, we Pakistanis like to do things differently to the rest of the world.

Originally published in Dawn, 2011

Zaroorat Hai...

Do any of us know what it is that we are looking for in a prospective spouse when we find ourselves ‘on the market’? A lot of us think we know what it is that we want, only for all our relatives to inform us that actually, they know what it is that we want even better than we do. The only problem is that their respective opinions of what it is that we are looking for, while being absolutely accurate individually (for how can some aunty who has met you at Eid lunches and weddings, with a sum total of 37 minutes of interaction in your whole life, not know you better than you know yourself?), are often wildly divergent when set off against each other. What, then, is a young man whose biological clock is ticking to do? Does mother, in this case, really know best?

After all, especially in a typical ‘drawing room’ arrangement, one is not able to ask the really big questions: Do you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom or from the middle (or, heaven forbid, from the top) ? Do you eat ketchup with pizza (a deal breaker in most civilised societies)? How many hours of Indian soaps do you watch on average in a day? What is your favourite football team? Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis? Coffee or tea? Paper (money) or plastic? 

Another problem is that, in our society, many people are not comfortable communicating openly with their parents about what they really want (assuming, that is, that they know themselves). Of course, for some this is not as big a problem as with others; I know of at least one prospective groom who, when his mother asked him what kind of girl he was looking for in a spouse, replied that it was imperative that the incumbent be “hot”. Shallow, but honest. 

I guess physical appearance is fairly high on most peoples’ shopping lists when they go looking, though. Although I am told that facility with housework, adeptness with a sharp knife and other accoutrements of a domestic goddess are also fairly high up on the agenda with most people. Interestingly, although these things are also desirable for the parents of the male child, of equal importance for them are the family and other accessories, things that are not on the radar of most young men when they go a-looking. Darwin’s hypothesis about the perceived child-bearing ability of potential mates being directly proportional to desirability is, on the face of it, left undiscussed, although it probably figures very high on the unwritten list of the said aunties.

So what it is that a typical Pakistani male looks for in a spouse? Are the old stereotypes of a typical housewife, who has the homemaking capabilities of Delia Smith, Martha Stewart and Zubaida “Totka” Tariq all rolled into one still applicable today? The answer, it seems, is not a simple yes or no. A straw poll of office colleagues indicates that while most are more than happy to help with the housework, especially when not living as part of an extended family, there is still a latent expectation that is the wife who will wake up at 4am to make parathas for sehri, regardless of the fact that both may have full-time jobs.

And certainly, career women have to bear a greater share of the housework than their spouses, even if the latter are part of a growing breed who do lift a finger around the house. And although I do know of couples where most of the cooking is done by the takeaway down the road, such are few and far between. And the jury is definitely out on how outspoken a person Pakistani men are comfortable with; the answer, it seems, lying with the level of confidence of the man in question and, to a greater extent, the people within earshot when the wife tells her man the exact prices of flour and lentils.

To complicate matters further, it often seems like what we say we are looking for is quite different from what we end up seeking out. One of my friends, for example, stated for the record that the person he was looking for should be young, not very well educated and completely malleable, only to get married to someone the same age as himself, highly educated and highly opinionated. Presumably he over-estimated the size of his male ego, or decided to take the selfish route (as in theory his desired mate would have been able to “adjust” better in his family – “adjust; what a word! And one that is used to hide a multitude of sins, much like shalwaars with extra wide ‘ghairs’ are used to hide a multitude of sehri paratha-inflicted spare tyres). 

And what of me? Well, I would like to think that my list was a simple one. A good level of education, a sense of humour, being more actively religious than I am, and an interest in reading for pleasure all featured highly. But then, again, it is likely there was much that was left unsaid. I was lucky enough to find someone myself, and thus avoided the whole ‘arranged marriage’ lottery, but it just goes to show that making a list and checking it twice is no guarantee that one will get what they are looking for, as there is no guarantee that any such list will actually hold even half the items that one is truly looking for.

Originally published in Dawn, some time in 2010

The Talaaq Naama That Never Was

If there was some kind of documentary proof of being a supporter of Pakistan cricket, I would have torn mine up in disgust on the 6th day of January, 2010, much in the manner that put-upon football fans tear up their season tickets in a final gesture that says “To hell with you; you shall make my life a misery no more!”

It would have lived through much, battered and worn from being oft-displayed, and carried near to the heart. It would have been stained irrevocably in December 2000, when the test team went out on the field of the National Stadium with no intention of even trying to win, and lost ignominiously in semidarkness to an England side despite some of the most blatant time wasting ever witnessed on a sporting field. Although lack of subtlety has not been our strong suit as a nation (have a watch of any Punjabi film song on cable for proof), there are limits, really.

It would have been frayed and dented in 2002, when a Pakistan team not made up entirely of mugs could not post an aggregate total of more than 120 over two test innings in a ‘home’ game held somewhere in the Middle East. And although Multan in 2004 would have come close as one of the most abject all round performances handed Sehwag his maiden treble hundred and Saqlain his Test P-45, but all of these would have paled in comparison to what this cricket fan has had to live through these past few days.

Although this is the Multan stadium, thankfully I wasn't there for the drubbing aginst India. This is from the England tour in 2005.

There is probably nothing crueller than to be given hope only to have it snatched away again. And no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that this hope is forlorn, that your team is standing at 10 losses in 10 tests played, and were odds-on to finish the series with a 0-12 record, hope (that vindictive harpy) still rears her ugly head. Again and again this team has contrived to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but this was the last straw.

I am tired of caring. All it has brought is heartbreak and disappointment. I guess I am the only one who thinks that we can, if we get our act together, win without biting great gobs of leather out of the ball, or doing a jig on the pitch, or indeed that anyone guilty of one of those offenses, let alone both, should be summarily stripped of the captaincy for life.

Newsflash mate: your offense was not one of off-field shenanigans but on-field cheating. Compare yourself not to Tiger, but to Ben Johnson. But why would you, when yours dandruff-free head has had the captain’s crown placed upon it again? Taint it with impunity; you are not the first, and most probably not the last either.

Is this faith in the possibility of odds being overturned on the playing field unreasonable for a nation at the bottom end of pretty much all KPIs of nationhood, borne of a fateful morning nearly two decades ago when a barrel-chested captain walked on-field for a toss with a cornered tiger emblazoned on his chest? I will disagree with my mate Silas and submit that the world is replete with sporting teams from nations as troubled as ours who have gone on to perform amazing feats without any illegal assistance. Although his analogy of Pakistani cricketers being less like the cornered tigers we wish they were, and more like the petulant children they are, seems increasingly apt.

I realise that I am probably in a rapidly shrinking minority of Pakistanis, whose great triumphs and greater disappointments are linked to the longer (or should I now say longest?) version of the game. The increasing popularity of the circus freakshow as sport that is twenty over cricket is, to me, yet another example of the rot that has set into civiliszation as we seek instant gratification instead of a sustained experience.

I have sat on this piece too long – after all, a declaration of this magnitude (and I am not being facetious here, I am part of an entire generation that is defined by a single swing of Miandad’s bat in Sharjah) in the national media is not something one can back ingloriously away from easily. Hence I started writing this piece in January, and have been sitting on it ever since, hoping to consign it to the Recycle Bin only for some fresh fiasco to revive my bile and resurrect this piece.

And so we stand here, a month away from the annual world championship of a competition that sees us being less-than-abject simply because there is a much greater element of chance involved, and the biggest piece of cricket news is about the betrothal of a banned ex-captain (we have a few of those knocking about, don’t we?) to a tennis player from across the Wagah, an item that may well be shown up as an early April Fool’s prank by the time this is published (if I can drum up the guts to submit this piece, that is). No news of the team, the coaching staff, or the preparations. Still, since every cloud must have a silver lining, we stand the outside chance of gaining a world top 50 tennis player on account of dual nationality. Here’s hoping they set up residence in Sharjah, for old times’ sake.

I give up, I really do. I will not take any time off in the summer to watch the England tests, catching up on my reading instead. I will purge Cricinfo from my ‘Favourites’ folder. I will give my replica shirt to charity. I will not allow former test cricketers who cry wolf at every loss, claiming each match lost by Pakistan to be a fix, to get under my skin any more. I will put my picture of a few friends at Lord’s, holding up the Pakistan flag despite a looming innings defeat, deep in a drawer, for even after all they’ve put me through I cannot bear to destroy it.



Lords, 2001. Nothing like a pair at Lords from Wajahatullah Wasti to put a smile on your face, regardless of whether you are holding the flag right side up or not.


This is it. I resign. I well and truly do.

Cards on the table time:

Originally written between Jan and April 2010, some months before the spot-fixing scandal hit the airwaves.

I never submitted this one for publication, even throughout the Mazhar Majeed fiasco, even when Salman Butt, while serving out his ban, was hired as a pundit by a local TV channel, even when every loss was declaimed as a fix by Sarfaraz Nawaz and Co, and despite the deplorable conduct of one Mr E. Butt. I have sat it on it through the dark days, and summarily failed to follow through on any of my commitments, spectacularly so.

Why, then, have I not ritually burned this piece, and why indeed am I choosing to put it up for public ridicule now? For clearly I didn’t mean any of the threats that I made, and not only do I continue to support the national cricket team in letter and spirit, but I really don’t see it ever ending. After all, if my loyalty has lived through the tribulations of the past two years, you have to admit it seems to be pretty much bomb proof.

I think a part of not publishing this earlier was the knowledge, somewhere in my heart, that I was never likely to follow through with this threat. So what has changed? I guess the reason is that I have come to terms with the fact that, no matter what they do to me, I will still be there for them, and this is my coming out party. When you spend four days turning the colour of a freshly cooked lobster in the presence of the Barmy Army, you learn certain things about yourself.  

Pakistan vs England, Third test,Dubai
Like a renewal of the vows

Pakistan cricket has tried my patience again and again. I have come damn close to pulling the plug on this relationship more than once. But here I still remain. For the fact of the matter is that while the bad days are bad indeed, the good days are so damn good that they more than make up for the bad.

Rohinton Mistry Broke My Heart

For someone who is as avid a reader as I am (and as pedantic to boot), the worst crime that can be committed is to abandon a book mid-read. Even if a book is an insufferable chore and slower than a snail with a ball and chain attached to it, one goes down with it, struggling manfully against the upswells of pompous language, the eddies of lack of story and the jagged rocks of funereal pace. But abandon ship? No sir!

I have struggled through the worst Garcia-Marquez inspired excesses of Arundhati Roy and emerged at the other end; I have read Booker-by-numbers dirges by everyone from Nadeem Aslam to Kiran Desai; I have read Tolstoy at his most tedious, Coehlo at his most convoluted, Mahfouz at his most melancholy, Dickens at his dreariest, Kafka at his most kaotic, and lived to tell the tale. But this is not the tale of big-name authors who write books that should be sold with a warning label. This is the story of the first book that I ever abandoned unfinished.

There is a running conversation among some of my movie-loving friends, that all the directors who have made a very good first film in the New Wave of Indian Cinema (1994 onwards, say) have gone on to make a truly poor second one. And it seems that this habit is not restricted to filmmaking either; for the eponymous villain of this piece also made his debut with a true gem of a book, only to follow it up with what could be described as tripe, only there is a high chance that this analogy would offend all tripekind.

Rohinton Mistry’s first book was “Tales From Ferozsha Baag”, a collection of short stories about the dwindling Parsi community in Bombay. The story was told through the residents of a colony of Parsis and dealt so lovingly with their lives, loves and losses that the affection felt by the author towards what clearly are his friends and neighbours thinly disguised shines through the pages. It is a truly remarkable book with the insights that only an insider can provide, and highly recommended by me unreservedly.

I read this book in my “India” phase; I was in England, living alone and working towards my Chartered Accountancy qualification. Being away from home meant that I tended to read a lot of ‘local’ authors, typically anything that came highly recommended on Amazon, or that was available in my local library. “Tales from Ferozsha Baag” fell in the latter category. I fell unreservedly in love with the book, with its sheer joie de vivre, with its cast, who were Characters yet not caricatures. My library did not have any other books by this author, who was apparently highly fêted and decorated. So I went out the very next Saturday to my local Waterstones and picked up a copy of Mistri’s second book. It was called “Family Matters”, and had apparently been in the running for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication. Little did I know that this simple transaction would have such far-reaching consequences.

It seemed that Mistry had set himself out to write the Venom to his original Spiderman, if I may be permitted a comic book nerd’s analogy. “Family Matters” was everything that “Tales from Ferozsha Baag” was not; more importantly, it was also nothing that the first volume was. It too was based in the Bombay Parsi community, but there the similarities ended. Where the first book was all sunshine and light, the second was the darkness of the Underworld, with accompanying chorus of damned souls.

I don’t think I had before, or have since, read a book where all the characters were so profoundly unhappy, or indeed where the author seemed to have so little affection for any of them. It is a book about mean little people and their miserable little lives. It seemed that Mistry’s literary agent had told him that the best way to get international acclaim was to be short listed for the Booker prize. The New Wave of Indian Literature is a Booker jury favourite, so Mistry had a pre-existing advantage that he had to capitalize upon. And the fool-proof way to do this was to write a tale of relentless, unceasing misery. I am sure that had I got deep enough into the book there would have been the obligatory paedophile experience thrown in for good measure.

I have read my fair share of dark and depressing books. But never before, and never since, have I read anything that is as thoroughly devoid of any sympathy, redemption or indeed narrative impetus. It is like the mean little lives of the characters, whom the author surely hates, is at a standstill, so must the flow of the narrative move at the pace of continental drift.

I tried, dear readers, I really did. To this day the tome looks balefully at me from atop my trunk of books, a piece of paper sticking out from the point beyond which I could not drag myself. It’s been more than 5 years, I think, but I have not yet admitted to myself that this is a book I shall never complete. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Others have tried my spirit, but “Family Matters” shattered it as thoroughly as is possible.

Rohinton Mistry, you broke my heart. You reeled me in with your ability to make me care about your characters, with the promise of taut narratives and a story you felt an urgent need to tell. And when I came to you, willingly spending my hard-earned zar-e-mubaadla, this is the blow you dealt me.

People may rave that Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” is a brilliant novel and well-worth a read, but I have been burnt by hot milk, and now drink even salt lassi by blowing on it to cool it down. I have no intention of picking up a Rohinton Mistry book any time soon, and woe betide anyone who tries to give me one as a gift. I’d rather get a desk ornament that I can at least pass on to someone else at their birthday; for I would not even give my worst enemy the gift of Misery… er… Mistry.

Originally published in Dawn, June 2008.

The edited version of the article, as published:

http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/books/archive/080622/books9.htm

Cards on the table time:

There is a bit of artistic license employed in the above. In reality, the first book I ever left unfinished was some utter tripe from a third rate Bombay hack, who basically wrote a fictionalised account of Amitabh's relationship with Rekha, set during the time when AB was in a coma after an on-set accident. I borrowed it from the Hemel Hempstead Public Library, and was glad to return it ahead of time.

The idea for the above came from my first (and only, I think), visit to the Books and Authors team's room at Haroon House (which, by the way, is an extremely interesting place to visit as a first-timer, with corridors, doors sometimes-open-sometimes-shut, hives of activity half-seen or sometimes just heard; I could go on). Saima had (I think) decided that she was no longer going to give me books to read for free until she could put a face to an email, so off I went, the better to protect my supply lines.

We got to talking and, true to form, I went off on one on the subject of pet hates. I put the tagline to her, and she was hooked. This in itself is a first for me, by the way, as normally my suggested titles are promptly binned by my editors. I bashed out the above in a matter of hours, and here we are.

Much Ado

On reading one of my pieces in this publication, an acquaintance commented that my writing was too ‘modern’ for his tastes. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and not a pleasant one, as I have always tried to maintain an air of good natured, vapid jollity in the best traditions of PG Wodehouse.

How, then, to answer this slur upon my good name? (Please note that I manfully resisted the distinctly modern urge to use the compound word ‘goodname’) I determined that the best way to silence the naysayers would be to set about crafting a piece unmistakable in its Shropshire origins and this, dear reader, is the result. And yet, even as I scribble down these words (yes, I am writing in good old ink, just to prove how Old School I am), I realize that writing an article that is essentially about writing an article is distressingly post-modern. Drat! Thwarted at the first fence!

Perhaps, then, I should seek to draw inspiration from a source even more steeped in history. I have been fascinated by the Bard ever since my Literature teacher belted out the closing song from “Twelfth Night” in a pretty good baritone in front of an enthralled classroom of impressionable 14-year-olds. Perhaps constructing a piece in iambic pentameter would serve to prove that I can alliterate with the best of them...

But column widths in print are just too slim,

and verse in prose again a modern whim.

Then what can one do if one is to prove,

that classically drawn’s his every move?

Perhaps the Victorian era can serve as a source of material that I might draw on to convince the sceptics. But I must admit that tales of elemental corsetry and emotional constipation leave me cold. I realize that I must now raise my voice in order to be heard above the crescendo of gasps emanating from the thousands of female readers for whom Mr. Darcy is the epitome of strong, silent manhood, but I maintain that, in this day and age, tales of smouldering looks and shuddering bosoms should be confined to the lower echelons of trashy romantic fiction, and even those have abandoned the officious prose of their more genteel forefathers.

And yet, I am being constantly assailed by the feeling that I am barking up the wrong bookshelf. After all, in all the creative pursuits it does appear that borrowing heavily from the past is one of the best ways of exhibiting your progressiveness. There is the ‘old wine in a new bottle’ rock of The Darkness and Wolfmother, the ‘black and white is the new Technicolor’ cinema of all the latest darlings of Uncle Oscar, the reinterpretations of the old Masters by Fernando Bottero and the skinny ties and slimline suits of the Paris catwalks. All clearly drink deeply from the well of their spiritual ancestors, and all are unequivocally labelled as modern.

Could it be, then, that in calling my writing ‘modern’, my critic actually meant that he could see in it echoes of the full breadth of my literary lineage? Tempting though this thought is, I think that if I were to believe this, I would be deluding myself, for the comment was delivered with just the hint of a look down the nose. From a man of that vintage, this can only mean one thing. His comment was intended to be taken in a ‘these modern kids have no appreciation for the past and no respect for their elders’ kind of way. To quote Dr. Mohammad Iqbal, and to confirm that my writing lineage is deeply intertwined with the mother tongue in addition to the Queen’s English:

“Tujhay apnay a’baa say koi nisbat ho nahin sakti

Keh tu guftar, woh kirdar, tu sabit, woh sayyara”

I realize that there is a risk in writing this article that your columnist, in addition to being labelled a modern writer, will be branded as a self-aggrandising snob, but I am willing to take the risk in order to clear my good (two words) name. Referring to oneself in the third person in places is surely not helping my suit either on this front.

What is one to do, then? All avenues appear to be closed. An affected writing style is as irritating as an affected accent; just compare the ‘British’ accents of certain DJs on certain English language FM radio stations to, say, ‘The God of Small Things’, and you will quickly agree with me. To digress a bit, one thing I cannot ever overlook is the incorrect and unnecessary addition of the letter ‘s’ at the end of the word anyway, which seems to be the favourite pastime of most of the said DJs and, by inference, a large portion of today’s teen brigade. So a conscious effort to change how I write would, on consideration, be counter to my own beliefs. And yet I cannot let this slur rest; something must be done.

Yet another undeniable proof of my ancient writing style is manifested in my unshakeable irritation in the way today’s word processing software is configured in modern Americanese. I know you can change the language to Proper English, but the software has a distressing habit of reverting to type. I feel compelled to spell my favourites and colours with u’s, and my organisations and modernisations with s’s – unmistakeably (with an ‘e’) Old School, you would agree.

My final argument against the modernising brigade is this: the modern age is one of minimalism, of paring things down, of never using three words when one will do. Even words have become truncated, dropping vowels and consonants faster than a Pakistani cricketer does catches, and txtspk has entered the common lexicon. Punctuation is something that has become largely optional for some of today’s most fêted authors, and in these times to insist on actually using commas and semi-colons, on nt shrtng ur wds and, in particular, to ramble on for a while just setting a scene can well be considered distressingly traditionalist.

You, dear reader, have just reached the end of an article that is impeccably spelt, thoroughly punctuated and, most importantly, is about absolutely nothing. The defence rests, even as Old PG smiles benevolently and approvingly from his grave, and forever lives on, in spirit at least.

Originally published in Dawn, August 2008

The edited version, as published:

http://archives.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/080803/dmag21.htm

Pehli Pehli Baar Hai...

Been thinking of starting a blog for a while, but it seems like quite a self-indulfent thing to do. For one, it cannot really serve as the bowl into which I can pour the darkest demons of my soul (too public), and for another, I am not sure if I have the consistency to do this over an extended period of time.

What I am trying to say is, manage your expectations. and if you are a space traveller reading this in Stardate 214.A5C and see nothing after this, tough.

As a first, I will be reproducing here articles that I have written, which have been published in various places. The order of them being put on here has no occult significance, so please don't read too much into it.  Secondly, I will probably stick on a few pieces of fiction that I have written over the years, in various stages of finishedness.

The main point (and not in a scatological way: get your brain out of the gutter, Silas) is that this blog itself is very much a work in progress. I have no idea what it will turn into. Who knows, I might just start to let some of them demons out to play...