Don't think yourself stupid! :)

My brother and I walked over to my sister's place.

"Let's get something from that sweet store across from her flat" he said.

After a detour to that store, we walked in with keera vadai, vegetable cutlets, and chumchum.  Sister made tea (black for me, of course!) and we talked about stuff.

Somehow the chat turned to the topic of real estate prices in the city.  The figures are simply astounding.  So, naturally, I asked, "how do people afford such prices?"

The response was that professionals earn quite a salary these days.

"But, what about people like the domestic help?  I mean, where do they live?  How do they survive?  After the cyclone rains the domestic help didn't come over because of the water-logging."

Turns out that Earl has sane advice for idiots like me:

I laugh now, but I know I will keep asking these questions forever.  After all, that is why I ditched engineering!

Silent Night

Slowly, the days will start getting longer in the northern hemisphere ... to everything, turn, turn, turn

Wisdom, according to "Pickles." One good reason for newspapers!

The local newspaper, likes most papers, runs the comic strip only in black/white on all days of the week except on Sundays.  I so wish that the funny pages will be in color all seven days of the week.  But then how many people read the newspapers in print form anymore, eh :(

When I travel outside the US, which is mostly to India these days, I miss the funny pages the most.  We are in comics heaven here in America.  Our paper features two pages of comics every day, and then a grander and colorful Sunday edition.  I wonder what the reason is for us Americans (note how I identify with this adopted land!) to enjoy comic strips that much.

It is not that newspapers in India are dying either; in fact, the dailies there have a lot more pages than here.  The state of newspapers in India seem to be perhaps as healthy as the industry was here in the 1970s.  But, not a huge spread of comics though.  Don't other people like to smile and laugh every morning at least to temporarily forget all the depression that results from the news pages?

Why is everything so hard?

Yes, Virginia, there's "an app" for that :)