Not to do with sex but snoring!

In Marathi world, snoring is not made as much fun of as it deserves. It is perhaps because far more men are victims of it than women.

I have been snoring, I think pretty horribly, for many years now. Luckily for our marriage and our budget (as explained later), my wife sleeps like a log and only the noise of my nose blowing, next only to a bad dream, can wake her up.

TRACIE ROZHON in her article “To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime” (NYT March 11, 2007) says:

“Not since the Victorian age of starched sheets and starchy manners, builders and architects say, have there been so many orders for separate bedrooms. Or separate sleeping nooks. Or his-and-her wings.
In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.”

Lady in the picture is surely on her way to order her own bedroom.

Artist : Dana Fradon Publication: The New Yorker 4 March 1985

In picture below, Mrs. Booth did not cure anything. Booths moved into a larger house with separate bedrooms!

Lucky me!

Artist : Helen E Hokinson Publication: The New Yorker 9 May 1936

Dark Side of the Moon

In Marathi, I hear cartoons are increasingly being referred as हास्यचित्रे “Hasyachitre”. But cartoons are not necessarily about a laugh (हास्य) or a smile or even a chuckle.

Following cartoon made me cry. Tragedy of aging.


Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker 19 April 1958

By the way moon travel itself has come under a lot of flack of late.

I remember post 1969, moon travel was every where. ‘Forts’ children make in Maharashtra during Diwali used to have themes of Apollo mission. Ganesh festival pandals exhibited moon landing ‘scenes’. Neil Armstrong for few years was as popular as Rajesh Khanna. Experts predicted that faith in astrology would come down because moon- who plays such an important part in one’s horoscope- was soiled by a mortal man.

Resurgent Hindu and Muslim fundamentalisms were few years away. Hence, no one talked about Buzz Aldrin performing the ritual of Holy Communion on the surface of the moon.

Gerard DeGroot author of “Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest” calls moon missions “ A $35bn ego trip - an outrageous waste of money that should have been spent addressing problems on Earth. For him, Neil Armstrong’s “small step” on to the moon achieved nothing for mankind beyond a brief burst of media-generated euphoria. Its main purpose, to beat the Russians in the race to the moon, had been achieved. The astronauts were paid off and space travel gave way to other fads.”

“DeGroot, a fine writer with a real flair for storytelling, has fun with Nasa’s extravagance and its tendency to look for complex solutions where simple ones would do. For example, the agency developed a pen that would write in zero gravity - an invention that is still marketed to gadget enthusiasts. The Russians made do with pencils. And he demolishes the commonly accepted idea that Teflon and Velcro were spin-offs of the space race."

Inflation

Inflation once again has become hot. It is on TV! TV screen does not like old and poor people but likes the reason which wories them most- Inflation!

In India, from ages, we have weighed our royalty- both borne and elected- using various things. (It is interesting to note that renowned Marathi-Farsi poet Madhav Julian माधव जूलियन् was weighed in footwears just after his birth because he would not stop crying - "Aamchi Akra Varshe" by Leelabai Patwardhan)

Inflation seems to have affected even that practice!


Artist : James Stevenson Publication: The New Yorker 7 Nov 1964

And how are we middle class people coping with it when even our neighbourhood shopkeeper is so scared……..

Artist: Barney Tobey Publication: The New Yorker 28-8-48

Nothing except facts

I am not perfect , I never was, I never will be in anything I do , have done or will do.

Let me please belong!

Artist :James Thurber Publication: The New Yorker 12 Dec 1936

To help corporations find their soul ?

Adman Bruce Barton in 1923 said that the role of advertising was to help corporations find their soul.

"I like to think of advertising as something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it. . . . Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls,"

Artist : Frank Modell Publication: The New Yorker 5 Nov 1960

What is ‘meaning’?

What is the real meaning of life? What is my purpose?.........

Mario Pisani reveiwed the book "THE MEANING OF LIFE by Terry Eagleton" for FT on March 2, 2007।

It has these lines : " I decided to put the book’s analytical framework to the test। I identified three people with very different perspectives on life, and asked them what it meant to them।

A British friend, a member of the international policy-making elite, answered with a dry “it means nothing.” A German colleague said something along the lines of “to be happy.” My Turkish corner-shop-keeper answered “What is ‘meaning’?”

It looks like Eagleton got it right, after all."

Artist: Lee Lorenz Publication: The New Yorker 10 Dec 1960

Mother's Love

Sigmund Freud : "He who knows his mother's love and is secure in that knowledge will never know failure।"

Tom Wolfe: “The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium”.


Artist :Alan Dunn Publication: The New Yorker 14 Nov 1936

is smoking evil?

I have always felt that so-called 'vices' bring people together.

When in college, I always envied smokers who could make friends so easily and had no trouble in passing time anywhere and on any occasion.

Even at work, especially in non-smoking offices, smokers gathered outside and networked.

Artist : William Hamilton Publication: The New Yorker 31 Jan 1994

if we didn't make it somebody would!

Money for the sake of money has become the objective of many (most?) of us. It has become a favourite habit and past time. If every excuse fails, this could work : if we didn't make it somebody would!

Masahiko Fujiwara - author of best selling Japanese book "The Dignity of a State"- says: "Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen. But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity."

Similar thing has happened to educated Indians.

Does money make us more happy? There is overwhelming evidence against it.

Consider a paradox outlined by London School of Economics economist Richard Lay­ard in Happiness (Penguin, 2005), in which he shows that we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950 and "we have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nicer work and, above all, better health."

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert goes deeper into our psyches in Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006), in which he claims, "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." Much of our happiness depends on projecting what will make us happy (instead of what actually does), and Gilbert shows that we are not very good at this forethought.

Michael Hecht- author of The Happiness Myth (Harper, 2007)- writes, "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." Take sex. "A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for the health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence."

Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker Jan 30 1960

Artist : Bruce Erik Kaplan Publication: The New Yorker 4 Apr 1994

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

I have just added a line to the subtitle of this blog: What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing.

As you may read some of the items here that could be your response. Even I have not found everything funny here!

JOHN TIERNEY NYT March 13 2007: "Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science.....They’ve discovered something that eluded Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humour.....Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.......most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly....The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing."