We were listening to some BBC-ish news broadcast in the car on the way back to San Francisco this afternoon, and along came a feature about why India is seemingly poised to be an economic superpower and yet cannot get its damn act together except to export the occasional paisley scarf (which, I am warning you, will bleed dye onto your clothes, so don't even bother). I could go on and on about this topic, but I will leave that to the professionals. Anyway, the talk in the broadcast turned immediately to the, you know, rampant abject poverty afflicting the majority of the population, and they interviewed a couple living in the slums of Delhi. They were speaking Hindi, and before the translator kicked in I heard them saying "Hindihindi paani hindihindiblahblah paani," and I said to James "They are saying they don't have access to water." Paani ('water') is one of the one words I remember from Hindi lessons last year, and it didn't take a giant leap to guess that the people in the slums of Delhi might be mentioning water to a reporter because hello, they don't have any. But my point here is not political, my point is that I actually got to trick James into thinking I knew some Hindi, and thus that maybe I knew something he didn't already know--unlike, say, the current status of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and what it means with respect to finding the elusive Higgs boson, or the latest news from the field of evolutionary computation, or the minutiae of U.S. traffic law (see post below).
The other notable thing we heard on the British radio broadcast was a guy talking about the Olympics. We weren't really paying attention, but we both perked up when we suddenly heard him saying something about "synchronized diving, pistol shooting, weight lifting, and cycling." James said, "Wow, it must be really hard to keep all of those synchronized."
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