Sunday, April 11, 2010

Million dollar quesion: Egg came first or Chicken !!!!

The 1 million-dollar question " Egg  came first or the chicken?" resurrected some days back in my head. 

Chicken or egg? Each attempt at an answer just leads to another question. If the chicken came first, then didn't it hatch from an egg? And if the egg came first, wasn't it laid by a chicken? It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable.
Scientists agree on where chickens came from: In a sense, human beings invented them, just like they invented cows and pigs and other domesticated animals on Old MacDonald's Farm.

If chickens were interested in tracing their family trees, they would need to bone up on some DNA research. Every chicken that ever lived can trace its ancestors, say researchers, to a particular subspecies of Red Jungle Fowl in Thailand.

Scientists think the first domestic chickens were bred from Red Jungle Fowls more than 8,000 years ago in the region now divided into Thailand and Vietnam. People bred chickens first for cockfighting contests, later for eggs and meat.

So the first official "chicken" pecked its way out of an egg laid by a bird that was not-quite-a-chicken. Depending on how you look at it, the egg--or the wild chicken--came first.

In creating the domestic chicken--and coming up with some 175 varieties--human beings also created a world where chickens rule the breed: There are more chickens than any other kind of domesticated bird on Earth.

And where did birds come from? Scientists think that a group of egg-laying feathered dinosaurs were probably the ancestors of today's birds. So if it weren't for dinosaurs, there wouldn't be any Jungle Fowl OR chickens.

So looks like  the riddle of where chickens came from, is solved. But wait, there's still the question of where eggs came from.

Scientists say eggs--handy miniature incubators of life, nutrients already packed inside--evolved more than 1 billion years ago, in the oceans of Earth when land animals evolved and their eggs had a tough covering to retain moisture on dry land. 

So may be  "the egg" came first on the earth

 The Crux is : 
The chicken came after the bird, the bird came after the dinosaur, the dinosaur came after the egg. And the egg came long after the first single-celled bacteria, the prokaryotes, evolved in the oceans, some  billion years ago.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Hip Hop Version of Ramayana



A young second generation Indian kid in US was asked by his mother to explain the significance of DIWALI to his younger brother.
This is how he went about it ...................


"  So, like this dude had,like, a big cool kingdom and people liked him. But, like, his step-mom, or something, was kind of a bitch, and she forced her husband to, like, send this cool-dude, he was Ram, to some national forest or something.....

Since he was going, for like, something like more than 10 years or so... He decided to get his wife and bro along...you know...so that they could all chill out together. But DUDE, the forest was reeeeeal scary shit...    really man... they had monkeys and devils and shit like that.

But this dude, Ram, kicked ass with darts and bows and arrows...so it was fine. But then, some bad gangsta boys, some jerk called Ravan, picks up his babe (Sita) and lures her away to his hood. And boy, was our man, and also his bro, Laxman, pissed... And you DON't piss this son-of-a-gun cuz, he just kicks ass. And like..., all the gods were with him..

So anyways, you don'y mess with gods. So, Ram, and his bro get an army of monkeys..Dude, don't ask me how they trained the damn monkeys..just go along with me, ok... So, Ram, Lax and their monkeys whip this gangsta's ass in his own hood. anyways, by this time, their time's up in the forest..and anyways...it gets kinda boring, you know... no TV or malls or shit like that. 
So, they decided to hitch a ride back home... and when the people realize that our dude, his bro and the wife are back home...they thought,well, You know, at least they deserve something nice... and they didn't have any Bars or clubs in those days... so they could not take them out for a drink,so they, like decided to smoke and shit... and since they also had some lamps, they lit the lamps also.. so it was pretty coooool.. you know with all those fireworks.. Really, they even has some local band play along with the fireworks .. and you know, what, dude, that was the very first, no kidding..,that was the very first music-synchronized fireworks..you know, like the 4th of July stuff, but just,more cooler and stuff, you know.

And, so dude, THAT was how,like, this festival started. Cool! DIWALI rocks, Maaann...!!!!

(material taken from a mail, I got some years back)