After four or five viewing sessions, we completed Lagaan, an Indian film recommend by Larry. It turned out quite good. We used our Indian cookbooks to get into the flavor of the show, and made dinners with a number of new as as well as some already tried recipes. Good movie and good food.

The story, set during the 1890s, has Indian villagers team up against a British East India Co. team after the arrogant officer in charge there proposes a bet. If the English win, the Indians have to pay three-year's worth of lagaan (taxes on their fields) but if the Indians win, their whole province does not have to pay lagaan for three years. So there's a lot at stake for both sides.

A number of musical pieces appear in the film, but not near as many as would in a typical American musical. The thing most surprising to me about the film was that neither side stooped to cheating as I kind of expected would happen at some point. Honorably done, there, by the writer.


Biking has been on-again, off-again during the mornings and evenings over the past couple of weeks. Some mornings are too wet for comfort, and there's much to do in the evenings. But I've been keeping at it pretty well, one way or the other. Last night I put a strip of armor inside the tire tubes to deflect flat-causing debris from puncturing the tubes.

And while doing so, I discovered that Nellie has these cool levers that cause the brake pads to move toward the wheels, in increments. These mean not needing to make pain-in-the-butt adjustments to the braking mechanisms as the brake pads wear down. Just click the lever a notch and the pads get closer to the wheel. When the pads finally wear out, reset the lever after adding the new pads and start over. Nice feature! Thanks, Santa!