Marital landmines!

Have you ever walked in a mine-field fully aware that it is a mine-field, but totally oblivious to the placement of the mines?

Well those who are married would have had the opportunity of being in a situation like that though not literally. If I am allowed to compare marriage to a mine-field (just a metaphor) then following are some of the mines that one might risk stepping upon.

Is this dress ok?
When can we go to my mother's home?
Will you buy me that ... (err,,whatever...)
Who is that girl in the photo standing beside you?
Did you drink? Did you smoke?
Do you drink now? Do you smoke now?
I think I have added more salt in the curry, haven't I?

Just like in our school days when we were informed about one sure shot question that would come in our exams, the following in my opinion is a sure shot question all the husbands would have been asked by their better halves.

"I have become fat, haven't I?"

Kindly observe the pattern of the question. It's not "Have I become fat?"
but "I have become fat, haven't I?"

You can simply give a no as an answer for the first question, but for the second one you can't simply give a "no" because you are contradicting her statement that she has become fat. That itself draws an angry look from her and the mine under your two legs will go off.
But on the other hand if you answer her with an "YES" then the highly destructive C4 explosive that's tied to your chest will just go off. Don't bother to ask me why I haven't informed you about the bomb. You have more important issues at hand :-)

Recently I had to counter one such situation and by God's grace (I started to believe in God after this incident), I managed to come out of it with flying colours.

The question was "The circles under my eyes are too dark, aren't they?" It was a catch22 and amazingly I managed to say this.
"I don't know if the circles are just dark or too dark, but they certainly seem tired with all the hard work you put in since early morning. Wash your face and take a nap"

This time I managed not to step on the mine. Let's see how it goes in this endless mine-field. :-)

Beat this configuration!!!!!

Recently I read a piece about the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which I thought of sharing with you all. This is related to a previous post about particle physics which I posted on April-2010.

The LHC is a super machine in every sense. It is large, with tunnels of 27 km in circumference, but it is built with the precision of the finest of Swiss watches. A 100 megapixel camera at the junctures of two tunnels captures images of the collisions, taking 40 million pictures a second, each of them one megabyte in size. A processor farm of 50,000 cores processes these images and selects 200-300 each second. The pictures create 10 million gigabyte of data a year (enough to fill three million DVDs), and this data is processed by 1,00,000 computers in 34 countries. Then 10,000 scientists pore through this data. The four experiments at LHC together form the biggest collaboration in the history of science.

Now tell me if anything beats this configuration!