This is a picture of a Gurudwara, a Sikh temple across the street from Pulao’s family’s flat in Delhi. Pretty, no? Majestic and holy?

No. Sorry. Wrong answer.

It may look nice, but the Gurudwara has loudspeakers — two speakers on each corner of the temple, pointing out. Pointing across the street. Loud loudspeakers.

At five in the morning our first day here, it seemed that people from the Gurudwara were shouting in my bedroom. The Sikh priest was leading a call to prayer. Not just to the faithful inside the temple, mind you, but to any stragglers in the neighborhood, too — maybe the guys who got up a little late, or anybody who just wanted to enjoy the services streetside. I didn’t understand a word, but the voice had quite a commanding tone, and I sat up in bed, ready to act.

It was something between a call and response and (to borrow some religious terminology from my childhood) an opening hymn. It had a nice tabla backbeat, actually.

I was pretty annoyed the first few days (there’s a service every morning — no “Sunday-Sikhs” at our Gurudwara). I was fairly peeved at Sikhism in general. But the more I listen to the prayer, the more I realize it has a little groove to it. I find myself humming the tune in the shower. By the end of my trip, I might convert . . .

The other night at the bar, two of our friends tried to tell Pulao and me about a practical joke called “doortricking”.

“Have you ever heard of doortricking?”

“No,” we said.

“Well,” our friends continued somewhat sheepishly, “When someone goes into the bathroom, you strip naked and do a handstand right outside the door, so when they open the bathroom door, well . . . they’re surprised.”

Of course it turns out that “doortricking” can only be confirmed to have been done twice in the history of the world . . . both times by the same guy that they know (let’s call him “John”.) So this is not exactly sweeping the nation and maybe more aptly called “John is somewhat acrobatic and likes to take his pants off.”

I mulled the whole thing over for a while before I decided that this was not the practical joke for me. First of all, the elaborate joke would get even more complicated with the addition of the crane I would require to get into a handstand. And more importantly, any practical joke where you’re the one who ends up standing on your head, naked, defeats the whole purpose.

As of 2:49 PM CMT, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise audiobook is available as a free download on iTunes. But for how long . . .

You may have seen Hodgman as the winning, deadpan, occasional correspondent on The Daily Show. He’s also been recently immortalized as “PC” in the back-and-forth PC v. Mac ads.

The book, my friends Dan and Salma say, is hilarious. I’ve got my download, hopefully ready to make the long, long flight to India seem a little shorter. Read by the author!

Follow this link to iTunes free download.

The other day I went to the doctor to get some shots for my upcoming trip to India (Pulao and I leave Xmas day for a long vacation to her parents’ homestead in Delhi). Although there’s not much risk of malaria in Delhi, my doc says its pretty standard to take some kind of malarial prophylaxis when visiting India. OK, I say.

“There’re two drugs that are good. A cheap one with side effects, and an expensive one with none.”

This sounds to me like the intro to a parable, or a joke. “What are the side effects for the cheap one?” I say.

“Well, some people have gastro-intestinal problems. And some people go batty in the head.”

Ooo-kay . . .That’s the medical term, I’m guessing. From the Latin “batum”.

The expensive one, I find out — the sans-insanity one — is five bucks a pill. And you take one a day for a month. (For the math-addled or lazy, that’s $150). The cheap ones are only $20 for a month’s supply. I guess you can’t expect a prescription drug to keep you safe from malaria and psychosis for the price of a large pizza.

How much am I willing to pay for my peace of mind? You know, literally? Or all the pieces of my mind?

In other medical news, I got a couple of shots-in-the-arm vaccines, but also an oral one for typhoid. “This is a live, weakened strain of typhoid bacterium,” the doc said, holding up four pills. “So you have to take care of it. You have to take it on an empty stomach with lots of cool water, to make sure it lives long enough to get into your small intestines.”

Are you sure, Doc, that we want typhoid flourishing in my intestines? You know, if I took it on a full stomach, and the typhoid died, would that be so bad?

As a person who is already pretty batty, without medications, I tell you — it was hard for me to swallow that prescription typhoid. I wanted to wash my hands after I touched the pill but, you know, that would have been crazy.

Because coming of age is boring unless something else is going on.

Because the best time to make a list of your favorite albums of the year is less than three hours after you’ve had two teeth yanked from your lower jaw, with the dentist breaking one in the process and having to poke around in the hole to tweeze out all the root fragments—right?

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, and there’s an amazing one in Roger Miller’s “Careening with Conviction.”  Plus they’re haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head.  I can get behind that.

9.  Sons and Daughters, Love the Cup EP, 2004
I already had The Repulsion Box, so I knew what to expect:  punk set to a Scottish-folk beat.  (Or Scottish folk with punk vocals.)  Nonetheless, “Broken Bones” has some of the most restrained guitar I’ve heard this year, and “Johnny Cash” rumbles along quite nicely.

8.  Michael Gordon (composer), Decasia, 2002
Decasia the movie is a compilation of decaying filmstrips that flicker in and out of resolution for an hour.  Decasia the symphony is the best haunted-house music I’ve heard since Mocket’s Pro Forma.  The even-numbered movements are the spookiest—think Sonic Youth with a full orchestra.

7.  Gorillaz, Demon Days, 2005
A party album about the apocalypse.  “November Has Come” is my favorite song.

6.  Wilderness, Vessel States, 2006
I think every review of this album that I read compared Wilderness to Public Image, Ltd.  Fortunately, I’ve never heard Public Image, Ltd.  Whichever guy is the vocalist, he doesn’t sing so much as declaim, and the guitars sound pretty piddly to my PJ-Harvey-trained ears, but not in a bad way.

5.  The Timeout Drawer, Nowonmai, 2005
In the same post-rock (so:  instrumental-rock) vein as Sigur Ros and Mono, but without the adscititious sense of grandeur.  They wield keyboards, flutes, and cellos when necessary, but the whole album still sounds like it was recorded in a garage.  That’s the charm.

4.  Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger, 2005
I probably listened to this more than any other album I bought this year.  I finally figured out where they got their guitar sound:  Tommy Tutone.  “The Coast Is Always Changing” has the best chorus I’ve heard in a while.  Pure radio pop, or at least it would be if Clear Channel had any sense.

3.  Carla Bozulich, Evangelista, 2006
Carla Bozulich could fart on tape and I’d buy it and praise it.  The Geraldine Fibbers were just that good.  Evangelista is a little disappointing, though, mainly because I was hoping for an album that would sound like “Blue Boys” from the Kill Rock Stars compilation Fields and Streams:  all children’s instruments and toys, shaped into song.  Instead, she borrows Godspeed You! Black Emperor to make an album that sounds a lot like ‘30s blues, only with more screaming.  The cover of Low’s “Pissing” is too faithful, but “Evangelista I”…dude.

2.  Thomas Stronen, Pohlitz, 2006
Basically, he pulled out all his pots and pans, plinked away on them for half an hour, and added some keyboard squiggles to flesh out the sound.  But it works.  With its weird triangle pings, “Dispatches” is my favorite track.

1.  P.O.S., Audition, 2006
Local.  Genius.  At first I thought P.O.S. wasn’t as good as Atmosphere.  Then I noticed that I listed to this album every day, whereas I listened to Atmosphere about twice a month.  It’s like the crapitization of mainstream hip-hop never happened—there’s cello on “De La Souls,” punk screaming on “Half-Cocked Concepts,” self-deprecation on “Living Slightly Larger,” and P.O.S. acts like it all belongs there.  Best line is the first one.

I came across this machine when I was at a Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. In case you can’t tell, those are iPods and iPod accessories in the vending machine for when you have that hankering that a diet coke just won’t quench…

I’m having trouble typing this because my fingers are just that cold today at work. Yes, it’s Minneapolis, and yes, it’s about 13 degrees outside, but that doesn’t mean that other workplaces downtown have not managed, somehow, to heat their offices above absolute zero.

My office was a sad place already, before the freeze. Due to the demise of one of our magazines over a year ago, there are only four of us left, clustered into one lit corner of an entire floor of office space. Past the bathrooms, empty cubicles sit in the dark — long-ago gutted of any good office supplies. Or candy. It was me, mainly, who took the candy.

The head honcho here is retiring and all the divisions are being “reorganized”, which leads me and my 3 coworkers to think: are they trying to tell us something with the freeze-out? Hope we get the hint? A cold nudge out the door?

We’ve battened down instead, typing in our coats and scarves, and our boss pried open the thermostat-covers with a screwdriver and cranked them up. That hasn’t really worked yet, but I’ll keep you updated.

Sometimes people who design buildings, furniture, cars etc. are surprised by some of the unforeseen design flaws. We, for instance, recently had to purchase a new metal bed-frame because the free one that came with the new bed we bought made this sporadic clicking noise all throughout the night. I don’t know what put me more on edge, the clicking noise — or waiting for the next cadre of clicks to start-up.

Still, I understand that sometimes someone overlooks things when creating something. And that makes sense. But perhaps the least forgivable design flaw that I’ve seen or heard about recently was reported in the NY Times today: seats on the M.T.A. trains in New York regularly rip people’s clothes.

In fact, the M.T.A. has paid out over $100,000 in ripped pant/skirt reparations. Now, I’m no design expert, and sure we can understand the designer who puts the car radio knob out of reach of the driver or something, but shouldn’t the first thing you be thinking when you design a seat be: will this harm the person sitting in it and/or destroy all their clothing?

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