So while I was in Itaewon picking up shirts — short-sleeved shirts, I’m low on them, really, and it’s still warm enough for me to want some for work — I ended up dropping by the Halal food shop, actually one of them, because there are a few, and picked up some Bollywood DVDs. One of them, “Death Walks At Midnight/Aatma”, is totally worthless: it’s two CD-Rs with about 30 minutes of video on each. Krrish/Na Tum Jaano Na Hum are both cinema-rips and when I tried to play them in Totem, the subtitles were wonky — they started at the middle of the screen and wrapped around to the right side, so you had to read from the center to the right, then from the left to the center. It was very weird. Luckily, I spent some time earlier this month configuring MPlayer and it handled everything fine, so these two movies, and Viruddh/Waqt (which aren’t cinema rips) will also be watchable after all.
I may even get to use them in my class… in a couple of weeks, we’ll be doing Bollywood in the Popular cultures in English-speaking countries, and I thought India would be a good example of an English speaking country that isn’t straightforwardly, monolingually English speaking, but which has lot of English, and where the presence of English reflects colonial history, etc. I have some research to do this week, though.
So anyway, while in Itaewon I picked up a T-shirt on the street from this guy and his girlfriend who were selling them. There were several varieties of shirt, but the one I got says, “미국사람 아니