meretricious

meretricious

PRONUNCIATION:

(mer-i-TRISH-uhs)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Appealing in a cheap or showy manner: tawdry.
2. Based on pretense or insincerity.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin meretricius, meretrix (prostitute), from merere (to earn money).

USAGE:

"For most of the 20th century John Singer Sargent's skills as a portraitist were deemed to be meretricious."
Waldemar Januszczak; A Dirty Old Man And the Sea?; The Sunday Times (London, UK); Jul 11, 2010.

Explore "meretricious" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. -Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)

A Short History of Nearly Everything --- bacteria

In today's excerpt - bacteria:
"It's probably not a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes.
Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied
with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with
a magnifying glass, a habit that presumaby did not win him many repeat invitations
to dinner.
"In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on
and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive. If you are in good health
and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd about one trillion bacteria
grazing on your fleshy plains - about a hundred thousand of them on every square
centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of
skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep
out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with
the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they
give you B.O.
"And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more
tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to you hair and eyelashes,
swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth.
Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of
at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack
other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes,
have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. Every
human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial
cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view,
of course, we are a rather small part of them.
"Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics
and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria
to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities
or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes.
This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
"Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn't
survive a day without them. ... And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic
among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens,
the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes.
At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in
two days than there are protons in the universe. 'Given an adequate supply of nutrients,
a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,'
according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the
same period, a
human cell can just about manage a single division."
Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publisher: Broadway
Date: Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson
Pages: 302-304

buffalo

In today's excerpt - the tragedy that ensured the doom of the North American Plains
Indian was the unprecedented slaughter of the American buffalo since they had become
almost completely dependent on the buffalo for identity, sustenance and supplies:
"The greatest threat of all to the [North American Plains Indian] identity, and
to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in
the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill
thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering
creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be
restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without
a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.
"The first large-scale slaughter of buffalo by white men with high-powered
rifles took place in the years 1871 and 1872. There had been a limited market for
buffalo products before that. Even as far back as 1825, several hundred thousand
Indian-tanned robes had made it to markets in New Orleans. There had been demand
for buffalo meat to feed the railway workers building the transcontinental railroad
in the 1860s, spawning the fame and legend of hunters like Buffalo Bill Cody. But
there was no real market for buffalo hides until 1870, when a new tanning technology
allowed them to be turned
into high-grade leather. That, combined with a new railhead in Dodge City, Kansas,
meant that the skins could be shipped commercially.
"For hunters, the economics of the new business was miraculous, all the more so
since the animals were so stupefyingly easy to kill. If a buffalo saw the animal
next to it drop dead it would not flee unless it could see the source of the danger.
Thus one shooter with a long-range rifle could drop an entire stand of the creatures
without moving. A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In
1873 he killed 3,200 in 35 days, making Cody's once outlandish-sounding claim of
killing 4,280 in 18 months seem paltry by
comparison. Behind the hunters stood the stinking, sweating skinners, covered head
to toe in blood and grease and the animals' parasites. Legendary hunter Brick Bond,
who killed 250 animals a day, employed 15 such men. Covered wagons waited at [the
trading post of] Adobe Walls to take the stacked skins to Dodge City. Except for
the tongues, which were salted and shipped as a delicacy, the carcasses were left
to rot on the plains. The profits, like the mass killing itself, were obscene. In
the winter of 1871-72 a single hide fetched $3.50.
"Within two years these hunters, working mainly the Kansas plains close
to Dodge City, had killed five million buffalo. Almost immediately, they were victims
of their own success. By the spring of 1874 the herds on the middle plains had been
decimated. The economics of hunting became a good deal less miraculous. As one scout
traveling from Dodge City to the Indian territory put it: 'In 1872 we were never
out of sight of the buffalo. In the following autumn, while traveling over the
same district, the whole country was whitened with bleached and bleaching bones.'
Thus the hunters were forced to move farther from the railheads in search of prey.
...
"Surprisingly, only a few voices cried out against the slaughter of the buffalo,
which had no precedent in human history. Mostly people didn't trouble
themselves about the consequences. It was simply capitalism working itself out,
the exploitation of another natural resource. There was another, better
explanation for the lack of protest, articulated best by General Phil Sheridan,
then commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. 'These men [hunters] have
done in the last two years ... more to settle the vexed Indian question than the
entire regular army has done in the last thirty years,' he said. 'They are destroying
the Indians' commissary ... For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin
and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered
with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.' Killing the Indians' food was not
just an accident of commerce; it was a deliberate political act."
Author: S.C. Gwynne
Title: Empire of the Summer Moon
Publisher: Scribner
Date: Copyright 2010 by S.C. Gwynne
Pages: 259-262

fulsome

fulsome

PRONUNCIATION:

(FUL-suhm)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Effusive; lavish.
2. Excessive to the point of being offensive.

ETYMOLOGY:

A combination of the words full and -some (having a particular quality).

NOTES:

Does the word fulsome have a positive connotation or negative? Depends on whom you ask. The word started out in mid 13th century as a straightforward, unambiguous word to describe abundance. By the 17th century, it had acquired a deprecatory sense, as in the second sense listed above. Then, again, it went around the bend and in the 20th century the positive sense of the word become more common. Language purists continue to stick with the second sense, while others use the word in its first sense. What to do? Avoid it, unless context is clear, as in the two usage examples below.

USAGE:

"Dacres offered Hull fulsome compliments on the courage and performance of his men."
Ian W. Toll; Blood Brothers; The Economist (London, UK); Nov 4, 2006.

"One tires of the fulsome endorsement, the blizzard of exclamation points, the arch locutions."
Daniel Aaron; Belle du Jour; The New Republic (Washington, DC); Feb 2, 1998.

Explore "fulsome" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I hate with a murderous hatred those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die. -Mary Roberts Rinehart, novelist (1876-1958)

Oil on the Brain

In today's excerpt - the curse of abundant oil resources in developing countries
- in this example, Venezuela. Developing countries with oil grow only one-fourth
as fast as those without, and are far more likely to be militarized and devolve
into civil war. In fact, oil and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood
of
civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for
nondependent countries.:
"[With its oil wealth], Venezuela began to import more and more and produce less,
a typical symptom of Dutch disease, where resource-rich countries see other parts
of their economics wither. (Venezuela actually had Dutch disease before the Dutch,
but that term wouldn't be invented until the natural gas boom in the Netherlands
in the 1960s torpedoed the country's economy. The condition should be called the
Caracas cramp.)
"[After the discovery of oil in Venezuela in 1921], nobody paid taxes. If you're
an oil state, it's far more efficient to ask oil buyers for more money than to
collect taxes from your population, which requires a vast network of tax collectors,
a bureaucracy, laws that are fair, and a justice system to administer them. Collecting
oil money, by contrast, requires a small cadre of intellectuals to set policy and
diplomats to make it happen. ... The political, economic, and psychological ramifications
of this ... are profound.
" 'Systematically the government went after oil money rather than raising taxes,'
says economist Francisco Monaldi. 'There is no taxation and therefore no representation
here. The state here is extremely autonomous.' Whether it's a dictatorship, a democracy,
or something in between, the state's only patron is the oil industry, and all of
its attention is focused outward. What's more, the state owes nothing more than
promises to the people of Venezuela, because they have so little leverage on the
state's income.
"When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms
it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting
as much money as possible and encouraging the growth of a private economy to collect
taxes from. A strong private economy, so the thinking goes, creates a strong civil
society, fostering other centers of power that keep the state in check. Like other
intellectuals I talk with in other oil states, Monaldi finds taxes more interesting
and more useful than abstract ideas about democracy and ballot boxes. Taxes aren't
democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing
effects. Studies by Michael L. Ross at UCLA found that taxes alone don't foster
accountability, but the relationship of taxes to government services creates a struggle
for value between the state and citizens, which is some kind of accountability.
...
"Abdoulaye Djonouma, president of Chad's Chamber of Commerce, says oil brought about
economic and agricultural collapse in Nigeria and Gabon. For Chad, which has fewer
resources, he fears worse: militarization. He ticks off all the former French colonies
that have become militarized. Virtually all. (One study found that oil-exporting
countries spend between two and ten times more on their militaries than other developing
countries.) ...
"At Stanford, Terry Lynn Karl's analysis of Venezuela's economy during the 1970s
and '80s shows that countries whose economy is dominated by oil exports tend to
experience shrinking standards of living - something that Chad can hardly afford.
Oil has opportunity costs: A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Warner showed that
of ninety-seven developing countries, those without oil grew four times as much
as those with oil. At UCLA, Michael L. Ross did regression studies showing that
governments that export oil tend to become less democratic over time. At Oxford,
Paul Collier's regression studies show that oil, and
"At Stanford, Terry Lynn Karl's analysis of Venezuela's economy during the 1970s
and '80s shows that countries whose economy is dominated by oil exports tend to
experience shrinking standards of living - something that Chad can hardly afford.
Oil has opportunity costs: A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andres Warner showed that
of ninety-seven developing countries, those without oil grew four times as much
as those with oil. At UCLA, Michael L. Ross did regression studies showing that
governments that export oil tend to become less democratic over time. At Oxford,
Paul Collier's regression studies show that oil, and mineral-exporting countries
have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than
1 percent for nondependent countries."
Author: Lisa Margonelli
Title: Oil on the Brain
Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2007 by Lisa Margonelli
Pages: 146-147, 174-176

there seems to be a word for everything

psychopomp

PRONUNCIATION:

(SY-ko-pomp)

MEANING:

noun: A guide of souls, one who escorts soul of a newly-deceased to the afterlife.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek psychopompos (conductor of souls), from psycho-, from psyche (breath, spirit, soul) + pompos (conductor, guide).

USAGE:

"Harold Bloom here presents himself as a mystagogue and a soothsayer, a psychopomp of our times, conducting souls into unknown territories."
Marina Warner; Where Angels Tread; The Washington Post; Sep 15, 1996.

Explore "psychopomp" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters. -Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)

Words that aren't what they appear to be

Illustrating the importance of using the right word, Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning."
Choosing the right word is critical, but with a million words in the language, it's hard to get to know them all. Sometimes we have to hazard a guess, and try to figure out a word by its looks and sounds. It doesn't always work and results can be similar to placing the publication Style (instead of InStyle) in the waiting area of a hair salon.
This week we feature five words who meanings are different from what one might first guess.

artificer

PRONUNCIATION:

(ahr-TIF-uh-suhr)

MEANING:

noun:
1. An inventor.
2. A craftsperson.
3. A mechanic in the armed forces.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin artificium (craftsmanship, art), from art + facere (to make).

USAGE:

"The artificer turns a little sadly to his king: 'One day, I hope mankind will find a peaceful use for my invention,' he says."
Tom Lubbock; Flights of Fantasy; The Independent (London, UK); Sep 18, 2006.

Explore "artificer" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument. -Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

Words that look like one part of speech but are another

noisome

PRONUNCIATION:

(NOI-suhm)

MEANING:

adjective:
1. Offensive, especially to the sense of smell.
2. Harmful; noxious.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Middle English noy (short of annoy), via French, from Latin inodiare (to make hateful), from in- (intensive prefix) + odium (hate).

USAGE:

"Phasing out of noisome exhausts on motorbikes should be handled seriously and urgently."
ESG Response; Gibraltar Chronicle; Nov 28, 2009.

"The anti-social behaviour order, or Asbo, has helped to bring some relief to hard-pressed communities plagued by noisome neighbours and menacing yobs."
Making Justice Swifter; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Oct 8, 2009.

Explore "noisome" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another. -Juvenal, poet (c. 60-140)

phonograph-records

In today's excerpt - when commercial radio first appeared in 1920, the sales of
phonograph-records began to collapse. The unlikely savior of the phonograph-record
companies was a little-known genre of music from the South that came to be called
country music:
"The first shot in the media revolution occurred on November 2, 1920, when the first
commercially licensed radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, made its debut broadcast
by announcing the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Within months,
new commercial stations were popping up around the country like dandelions after
a spring rain. Some were a little bizarre - an early
Washington, D.C., station was licensed to a priest and boasted the call letters
WJSV, 'Will Jesus Save Virginia.' Others went to big commercial enterprises, like
Chicago's WLS, owned by Sears and standing for 'World's Largest Store.' Still others
were licensed to insurance companies, like Nashville's WSM - standing for 'We Shield
Millions,' the slogan of the owners, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company.
By 1922 and 1923, most major cities could boast of a radio station, and in the uncluttered
airwaves of the time, people routinely picked up signals from hundreds of miles
away.
"One effect of the popularity of the new radios had was to knock the bottom out
of phonograph-record sales. The flat 78 rpm records had been around since the turn
of the century, but record companies saw them as playthings for well-to-do families
of the time; they featured a lot of light opera, pieces by Sousa's Band, vocal solos
by Caruso, and barbershop harmonies by the Peerless Quartet. Now, suddenly, people
found they could hear music free on the radio; why buy records for seventy-five
cents apiece? Desperate to maintain sales, the record companies began casting about
for new markets. They stumbled upon one in 1920, when the Okeh label released a
song called 'Crazy Blues' by a vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith. It was the first
blues record by an African-American artist, and it became a bestseller by appealing
to a hitherto untapped record market - black Americans.
"In June 1923, the same man who had recorded Mamie Smith - Ralph Peer, a thirty-
one-year-old, moon-faced A&R (artists & repertoire) chief who had been born in
Kansas City, Missouri, but now worked out of New York - found himself in Atlanta
looking for talent. A local dealer promised to buy five hundred copies if Peer
would record the town character - Fiddlin' John Carson - a fifty-five-year-old former
millworker who had won fame at the Municipal Auditorium's annual fiddling contest.
Peer agreed and in a temporary studio recorded Carson playing the fiddle unaccompanied
and singing 'The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.' 'I thought his singing was pluperfect
awful,' Peer admitted years later. But he released the record - and was surprised
to see it become a modest hit.
"Within months, the race was on as the major record companies scrambled to tap into
this new market of working-class southerners. At first they didn't even know what
to call the music: Some ads mentioned 'oldtime southern tunes,' others 'hill country
music,' others 'oldtime music.' Victor called its series 'Native American Melodies.'
In 1924, a Texan singer working in New York, Vernon
Dalhart, actually had a nationwide hit with a train-wreck ballad called 'The Wreck
of the Old '97.' He followed this up in 1925 with a topical 'broadside' ballad called
'The Death of Floyd Collins,' about the miner who attracted widespread attention
when he was trapped in a Kentucky sand cave; this record sold more than three hundred
thousand copies, and if any of the record companies had lingering doubts about the
marketability of southern music, these reservations were put to rest.
"Following Ralph Peer's lead, the companies began sending talent scouts into the
South to hunt up and record on-location fiddlers, singers, banjo players, and gospel
quartets. In the summer of 1927, Peer hit pay dirt once again. In an old hat factory
doubling as a temporary studio, in the Virginia-Tennessee border town of Bristol,
he discovered the two acts that were to dominate country music's first decade: a
singing trio called the Carter Family and a former railroad brakeman named Jimmie
Rodgers."
Author: Edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown
Title: American Roots Music
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Date: Copyright 2001 by Ginger Group Productions Inc. and Rolling Stone Press
Page: 20

china -we need to learn from them

"In 2004 China shook automakers worldwide with the incredible speed and strictness
of the auto fuel efficiency standards it enacted, which are 5 to 10 percent stricter
than U.S. standards and among the toughest in the world.
"The task of writing the rules fell to the Ministry of Standards. ... Yin Minhan,
director of the Department of Industry and Transportation, ... is the epitome of
bright efficiency: Since 2000 he's worked on energy standards for a fast-forward
social history of Chinese consumerism: first electric motors, then refrigerators,
air conditioners, and now cars.
"Yin's group met with consultants from China as well as the Energy Foundation, a
U.S.-funded NGO, and then traveled to Japan, the United States, and Europe to gather
opinions on efficiency regimes. They decided to create a scheme that rewarded smaller
cars and imposed stricter fuel efficiency standards on larger ones. The standards
go into effect in two stages. In the first stage, only one U.S.-made SUV passes.
The second stage is harder still. 'We learned our lessons from the U.S.,' says
Wang Junwei, one of the five hundred or so people involved in auto standards at
the ministry. 'We are going to clamp down on SUVs early!'
"But there was a bigger strategy behind the rules than merely saving fuel and preventing
pollution. The ultimate intent of the regulations was to make Chinese-built cars
more exportable to high-end markets, such as Europe. Designed to pressure joint
ventures like GM and Volkswagen to send their newest technology to China, the standards
are part of the slow revolution that could make China the new Detroit.
"When the Chinese bureaucrats in charge of the standards listened to Detroit auto
executives denigrate fuel economy standards, they heard an opportunity. The team
perceived Detroit's reluctance as a strategic weakness and a clear way for China's
industry to become more competitive. 'China doesn't subscribe to the idea that what's
good for GM is good for the country,' an American consultant who worked with the
government team says with a laugh. ...
"[Outside of Shanghai] sits six square miles named Shanghai International Auto City,
recently carved from the rice fields of a town called Jiading. Three years ago Shanghai
decided it wanted to build a place for its auto industry to become the largest in
the world. Out went Jiading's farmers and little factories. In went Tongji University's
College of Automotive Studies, spaces for joint-venture auto assembly plants, parts
suppliers, testing facilities, a car museum, a wind tunnel, a golf course, and a
$320 million state-of-the-art Formula One track - in the shape of the first character
of Shanghai's name, which means, roughly, 'upward.' "
Author: Lisa Margonelli
Title: Oil on the Brain
Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Copyright 2007 by Lisa Margonelli
Pages: 269-270, 272.

Lungi

Just as the national bird of Kerala is the Mosquito, her national dress is  'The Lungi'. Pronounced as 'Lu' as in loo and 'ngi ' as in 'mongey', a  lungi can be identified by its floral or window-curtain pattern.  'Mundu' is the white variation of lungi and is worn on special occasions like hartal or bandh days, weddings and Onam.

Lungi is simple and 'down to earth' like the malayali wearing it. Lungi  is the beginning and the end of evolution in its category. Wearing something on the top half of your body is optional when you are  wearing a lungi. Lungi is a strategic dress. It's like a one-size-fits-all bottoms for Keralites.
 
The technique of wearing a lungi/mundu is passed on from generation to  generation through word of mouth like the British Constitution. If you  think it is an easy task wearing it, just try it once! It requires  techniques like breath control and yoga that is a notch higher than sudarshan kriya of AOL. A lungi/mundu when perfectly worn won't come  off even in a quake of 8 on the richter scale. A lungi is not attached  to the waist using duct tape, staple, rope or velcro. It's a bit of  mallu magic whose formula is a closely guarded secret like the Coca  Cola chemicals.
 
A lungi can be worn 'Full Mast' or 'Half Mast' like a national flag. A  'Full Mast' lungi is when you are showing respect to an elderly or the dead. Wearing it at full mast has lots of disadvantages. A major  disadvantage is when a dog runs after you. When you are wearing a lungi/mundu at full mast, the advantage is mainly for the female  onlookers who are spared the ordeal of swooning at the sight of hairy legs.

 Wearing a lungi 'Half Mast' is when you wear it exposing yourself like  those C grade movie starlets. A malayali can play cricket, football or simbly run when the lungi is worn at half mast. A malayali can even climb  a coconut tree wearing lungi in half mast. "It's not good manners,  especially for ladies from decent families, to look up at a malayali  climbing a coconut tree"- Confucius (or is it Abdul Kalam?)
 
Most malayalis do the traditional dance kudiyattam. Kudi means drinking  alcohol and yattam, spelled as aattam, means random movement of the  male body. Note that 'y' is silent. When you are drinking, you drink,  there is no 'y'. Any alcohol related "festival" can be enjoyed to the  maximum when you are topless with lungi and a towel tied around the  head. "Half mast lungi makes it easy to dance and shake legs" says  Candelaria Amaranto, a Salsa teacher from Spain after watching  'kudiyaattam' .
 
The 'Lungi Wearing Malayali Union' [LUWMU, pronounced LOVE MU], an NGO  which works towards the 'upliftment' of the lungi, strongly disapprove  of the GenNext tendency of wearing Bermudas under the lungi. Bermudas  under the lungi is a conspiracy by the CIA. It's a disgrace to see a  person wearing burmuda with corporate logos under his lungi. What they  don't know is how much these corporates are limiting their freedom of  movement and expression.

 A mallu wears lungi round the year, all weather, all season. A mallu  celebrates winter by wearing a colourful lungi with a floral pattern.

Lungi provides good ventilation and brings down the heat between legs.  A mallu is scared of global warming more than anyone else in the  world.

A lungi/mundu can be worn any time of the day/night. It doubles as  blanket at night. It also doubles up as a swing, swimwear, sleeping bag, parachute, facemask while entering/exiting toddy shops, shopping  basket and water filter while fishing in ponds and rivers. It also has  recreational uses like in 'Lungi/mundu pulling', a pastime in  households having more than one male member. Lungi pulling competitions are held outside toddyshops all over Kerala during Onam  and Vishu. When these lungis are decommissioned from service, they  become table cloths. Thus the humble lungi is a cradle to grave  appendage.

quotes 10.7.10

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
           -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
           -- Philip Guedalla

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
           -- Elizabeth Taylor

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
           -- Marquis de la Grange
Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.
           -- William Shakespeare

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
           -- Charles Kuralt

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
           -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
           -- Laurence J. Peter
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
           -- John Cage

I didn't really say everything I said.
           -- Yogi Berra

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
           -- Thomas A. Edison

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.
           -- John Ciardi

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
           -- Robert Frost

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
           -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
           -- Mark Twain
We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
           -- George Bernard Shaw, "You Never Can Tell" (1898), act I

People who reach the top of the tree are only those who haven't got the qualifications to detain them at the bottom.
           -- Peter Ustinov
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
           -- Paul Valery

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
           -- Christopher Morley
The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary.
           -- Dave Kellett, Sheldon, 02-01-09
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
           -- William G. McAdoo


Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
           -- Albert Camus

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
           -- Noel Coward

Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
           -- Katharine Hepburn

the taxi driver

The Cab Ride

I arrived at the address and honked the horn.
After waiting a few minutes I walked to the door and knocked.

'Just a minute', answered a frail, elderly voice.

I could hear something being dragged across the floor..


After a long pause, the door opened.

A small woman in her 90's stood before me..

She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it,

Like somebody out of a 1940's movie.


By her side was a small nylon suitcase.

The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years.

All the furniture was covered with sheets.


There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters.

In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware.


'Would you carry my bag out to the car?' she said.

I took the suitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman.


She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb..

She kept thanking me for my kindness.

'It's nothing', I told her..

'I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated'.

'Oh, you're such a good boy', she said.

When we got in the cab, she gave me an address and then asked,

'Could you drive through downtown?'


'It's not the shortest way,' I answered quickly..

'Oh, I don't mind,' she said.

'I'm in no hurry.

I'm on my way to a hospice'.


I looked in the rear-view mirror.

Her eyes were glistening.

'I don't have any family left,' she continued in a soft voice..

'The doctor says I don't have very long.

'I quietly reached over and shut off the meter.


'What route would you like me to take?' I asked.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city.

She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator.


We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived
When they were newlyweds.

She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once
Been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner

And would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing..


As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said,

'I'm tired. Let's go now'.

We drove in silence to the address she had given me.

It was a low building, like a small convalescent home,
With a driveway that passed under a portico.


Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up..

They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move.
They must have been expecting her.

I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door.

The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

'How much do I owe you?'
She asked, reaching into her purse.


'Nothing,' I said

'You have to make a living,' she answered.

'There are other passengers,' I responded.

Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug.

She held onto me tightly.


'You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,' she said.
'Thank you.'

I squeezed her hand, and then walked into the dim morning light.

Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.


I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift.

I drove aimlessly lost in thought.

For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk.

What if that woman had gotten an angry driver,

Or one who was impatient to end his shift?
What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once,

then driven away?

On a quick review,

I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life.


We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments.

But great moments often catch us unaware - beautifully
wrapped in what others may consider a small one.


PEOPLE MAY NOT REMEMBER EXACTLY
WHAT YOU DID, OR WHAT YOU SAID ~BUT~THEY WILL
ALWAYS REMEMBER HOW YOU MADE THEM
FEEL.

Life may not be the party we  hoped for,   but while we are here we might as well dance.

a cow boy named Bud

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Wyoming when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust..

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany ..

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep....
Now give me back my dog.