The world without us

The world without us by Alan Weisman

This is a reasonably interesting book where AW looks into the question of what would happen to the world if humans were to disappear overnight, which leads him to all sorts of fascinating topics about what can happen in the future, what has happened in the past, what is irreversible and what isn't. All the info is interesting, but nothing earthshaking, but overall, it does manage to create a grim atmosphere of the future facing this planet much more than isolated reports of arctic melting and retreating glaciers ever can.
In the end, he suggests a solution - reduce human populations gradually by limiting all females to a single child - but doesn't go into it in any detail at all. This is not a bad idea at all, compared to population reduction from wars/starvation, but I really would have expected some more discussion of this. China is already doing this, so expanding this to a global scale is not as unthinkable as one might imagine at first.

Film Editing

When the shooting stops, the cutting begins by Ralph Rosenblum
This is a fascinating book about film editing. Ralph Rosenblum explains very nicely what goes into editing a modern feature film with in-depth discussions of some of the movies he has worked on. He also goes into a lot of the history of the craft, as well as a lot of snippets of explanation of which kind of editing creates which kind of effect, which is very neat, because the editing is something that is very hard to notice while watching a movie. One of the most interesting tidbits was that after shooting a movie has 30-40 hrs of footage, which needs to be cut down to a 2 hour movie, which really makes clear how much of an impact the editor has.

Feast Yoo-hoo!

Last Sunday (Thanksgiving weekend) we invited Su-Georgie, Dua, and Dos over for dinner. We were feeling like making a "good" spread, so we came up with a menu of veg biryani (not pulao, no sirree, real biryani with baking and all :D), kadhai paneer, raita and mango sheera for dessert.
It was quite neat! The veg biryani recipe is straight out of Tarla Dalal's cookbook, so I won't record it here: Sam showed great accuracy in the rice cooking, and also great enthu in rushing out to Ross to buy a baking tray of the requisite size at 6:30 instead of cancelling the biryani and replacing it with a more modest pulao :D.
The kadhai paneer turned out really well too- the main key was to marinate the paneer in yogurt with haldi, chilli powder, salt and sugar. I marinated the paneer for nearly an hour and a half, and it made so much of a difference to the taste! Next time, I should marinate the capsicums as well (I used both red and green). The main other things were onions and chaat masala.
Mango sheera (halwa) is a killer dish. Fry sooji (semolina) and add milk when it has roasted enough. Add about 3/4 as much sugar as the sooji, and the mango pulp. It is just too deadly :).
Oh and BTW, everyone pigged a lot :D