The shortest story ever told

Legend has it that the young Ernest Hemingway said he could write a complete story in only six words! His colleagues disagreed, and each bet 10$ against the claim. Hemingway wrote down the words on a napkin and passed it around. Everyone agreed that he won the bet. Here is the shortest story ever told:  

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

Nor was this effort of Hemingway the only one in this genre. Here are some other gems worth perusing:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . .(Frederick Brown)

When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.(Augusto Monterroso)

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.( Margaret Atwood)

Good God, I’m pregnant; I wonder who did it.(Anonymous)

He asked her as the lift gave way. She smiled. They fell, in love. (David Williams)

He died. Unread. Unknown. ( Anonymous).

Calculating your life span

Size Matters: In the The Hidden Mathematics of Life Robert Krulwich argues that all creatures wax, we wane and then we die. It's the dance of life.

Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret.

Below the pulse is a life/death cycle, a pattern that shows up in the teeniest of plants, (phytoplankton, algae, moss), also in the bigger plants, (shrubs, bushes, little trees) — and even in the biggest, the needle bearing giant sequoias. Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming. 

We have recently learned its logic, which "You can put into mathematics," says physicist Geoffrey West. But it shows up with "extraordinary regularity," not just in plants, but in all animals, from slugs to giraffes. Death, it seems, is intimately related to size.

Life is short for small creatures, longer in big ones. So algae die sooner than oak trees; elephants live longer than mayflies, but you know that. Here's the surprise: There is a mathematical formula which says if you tell me how big something is, I can tell you — with some variation, but not a lot — how long it will live. This doesn't apply to individuals, only to groups, to species. The formula is a simple quarter-power exercise: You take the mass of a plant or an animal, and its metabolic rate is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power. I'll explain how this works down below, but the point is, this rule seems to govern all life.

A 2007 paper checked 700 different kinds of plants, and almost every time they applied the formula, it correctly predicted lifespan. "This is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms," West says. "It applies to me, all mammals, and the trees sitting out there, even though we're completely different designs."

It's hard to believe that creatures as different as jellyfish and cheetahs, daisies and bats, are governed by the same mathematical logic, but size seems to predict lifespan. The formula seems to be nature's way to preserve larger creatures who need time to grow and prosper, and it not only operates in all living things, but even in the cells of living things. It tells animals for example, that there's a universal limit to life, that though they come in different sizes, they have roughly a billion and a half heart beats; elephant hearts beat slowly, hummingbird hearts beat fast, but when your count is up, you are over. 

Plants pulse as well, moving nourishment through their veins. They obey the same commands of scale, and when the formula says "you're done," amazingly, the buttercup and the redwood tree obey. Why a specific mathematical formula should govern all of us, I don't completely understand, but when the math says, "it's time," off we go ...

Of course these rules do not tell any particular bee or dog or person when they are going to die. Every individual is subject to accident, caprice, luck. No, this is a general rule. It governs species. Modern humans have managed, because of medicines and hygiene, to become an exception, but 50,000 years ago, we were probably part of the pattern. 

But to summarize, nature goes easy on larger creatures so they don't wear out too quickly. An elephant has trillions more cells than a shrew, and all those cells have to connect and communicate to keep the animal going. In any big creature, animal or plant, there are so many more pathways, moving parts, so much more work to do, the big guys could wear out very quickly. So Geoffrey West and his colleagues found that nature gives larger creatures a gift: more efficient cells. Literally.

The cells in an elephant do more work in a minute than the cells of a mouse. That's why an elephant cell can beat at a slower rate than the rattatat-tat of a mouse cell. Both wear out after a billion and a half beats, but the elephant does it more slowly. As for the peculiar quarter power scaling differences, that rule emerges from the data when you plot the different lifespans of animals or plants on a graph. According to West, lifespan is connected to size. Elephants, for example, live longer than birds or field mice because the larger animals' hearts beat slower and use energy more efficiently.

Apparently size does matter.

Giant turtles, elephants and blue whales move through their lives with a slow grandeur that seems very different from littler creatures. Watch a hummingbird dart through a garden, or hold the smallest mammal, a little mouse-like shrew in your hand and you can feel it trembling with a feverish energy.

Though big and little creatures look very different, below the surface there is a surprising unity. Biologists have compared the heartbeats of mammals and discovered that on average (this won't apply to any individual, just to groups) elephants and shrews and most of the critters in between have a limit of about a billion and a half heartbeats in a lifetime and then they die.

The reason an elephant lives longer than a shrew is not because its heart beats longer. It's because its heart beats slower. So it takes a few more years for the elephant to complete his or her up to one and a half billion beats.

Now comes the subtler question: Why do big things use up energy more slowly?

Three scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary institute in northern New Mexico, took up this question a few years ago and discovered that if you compare elephants to lions to housecats to mice to shrews, you discover that heartbeats vary in a precise mathematical way. The mathematical principal is called Quarter Power Scaling and it is described beautifully in "Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale," by New York Times writer George Johnson. But here is the heart of it: Nature goes easy on larger creatures so they don't wear out too quickly.

After all, an elephant has trillions more cells than a shrew and they all have to connect and communicate and distribute energy and keep the animal going. In a little animal, the job is easier. In a big animal, there are so many more blood vessels, moving parts, longer pathways, there is so much more work to do, the big animal could break down much more quickly.

Call it Nature's Gift to Big Creatures. So Geoffrey West, Jim Brown and Brian Enquist discovered that nature gives larger animals a gift: more efficient cells. Literally. The cells in an elephant slow down and do more work than the cells of a mouse. An elephant cell, lumpity-dumpities at a slower rate than the rattatat-tat of a mouse cell. They both wear out by a billion and a half beats, (yes, cells have metabolic or energy-using beats, too) but the elephant does it more slowly, all the way down to the cellular level.

Human beings used to fit into this pattern, but now that we have learned to drink safe water, wash and bathe and create medicines, we last longer than our size would predict.

And if you want, you can check out Professor West's latest observation: that big cities are like big animals. They are — deep down — more efficient than smaller towns and villages. 

The art of punning

We all remember our college days when poor jokes (PJs to the uninitiated) and puns were the order of the day and helped while away the boring hours. But now Sally Davis writes about the gentle art of punning and traces its ancestry - I kid you not - to Jesus!

Where good humour and refreshments abound, puns seem to follow. Yet this neat little linguistic device - which exploits the multiple meanings of words or phrases that sound the same or similar - is considered by its detractors to be as irritating as it is irrepressible. Pun after all is the use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words. Consider the following:

·       "Heifer cow is better than none, but this is no time for puns" - Groucho Marx

·       "What's the name of a face lotion developed for Jewish women? Oil of Oy Vey" - Arnold Fine

·       "There are three Bachs - Johann, Sebastian and Offenbach" /

·       "I often bark myself" - Victor Borge

In the English-speaking world, punning is viewed as more of a tic than a trick, a pathological condition

The late William Safire, the New York Times's long-time language writer, wrote in 2005 that a pun "is to wordplay what dominatrix sex is to foreplay - a stinging whip that elicits groans of guilty pleasure".

Straight puns point to the facile cleverness of headline writers and embarrassing uncles. Elsewhere, they tend to be deployed sparingly, and with a dose of irony. How did the pun acquire such a dubious reputation?

John Pollack, a former Clinton speechwriter and author of the book The Pun Also Rises, thinks it fell out of favour during the Enlightenment, when the form's reliance on imprecision and silliness was out of kilter with the prevailing spirit of sophistication and rational inquiry. "Arrant puns" were the subject of attacks by the likes of Joseph Addison, 18th Century London's pre-eminent literary tastemaker. He decried them as debased witticisms and exulted that they had been "banished out of the learned world".

But puncraft did not always suffer from such bad PR.

The Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that "paronomasia", the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Jesus himself was a prodigious punster. His declaration that "upon this rock I will build my church" famously played on the way Peter's name echoed the Ancient Greek word for rock, "petra". Jesus may have also salted his speech with puns on Aramaic words, the language of everyday communication. When he condemns the Pharisees for letting punctilious piety blind them to mercy, Jesus calls them "blind guides, which strain at a gnat [galma], and swallow a camel [gamla]".

Here, then, puns seem to serve a purpose beyond the merely frivolous - to impart shades of meaning in an economical fashion, perhaps, or to render lessons and concepts more vivid and memorable to listeners.In other cases, darker psychological forces may underpin the pun. The humour theorist Charles Gruner has argued that puns are a product of humans' adaptive tendency towards competitiveness. We may groan at puns as an acknowledgement that we have been outplayed by a speaker who has asserted his or her superiority over us. Sigmund Freud, by contrast, identified puns as an admission of weakness, a psychic release-valve in which humour alleviates the stress of repressing unpleasant truths.

Hairdressers are masters of the art. Puns give them a cloak of deniability - the joke permits ordinary folk to make light of their social betters without violating the norms of respect. Sex and death were these characters' favoured subjects - Shakespeare seemed to intuit what Freud would argue some 300 years later, that humour helps us cope with the terrifying and taboo.

The purposes of puns seem to be as diverse as the circumstances in which they appear. But regardless of its rationale, punning is clearly more than a mere linguistic fillip. And there may be reason to hope that the internet will restore its reputation. The efflorescence of punnery on social networking sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, which bulge with the fruits of meme generators, suggests that puns have become acceptable as part of the online conversation.

It may be only a matter of time until the pun rises once again. But for now, its future is an impunderable question.

A legend ! Who ? Me !

I recently received a magazine from Economics Research Institute in India which had in it a recognition that I least expected:

On friendships - part 2

I have written in the past on friendship and how it is indeed the nectar of life, a plant that needs to be watered constantly to provide that wonderful aroma that enriches your life. Lately I have started wondering if friendships among males are different from that of females. Two incidents from my own life illustrate the nuances of this.

Some two decades ago, one of our close friends died of a heart attack on the tennis court in Bombay. I was in Delhi and the moment I heard of it I boarded a plane to Bombay. Bishnu was in Calcutta and he too similarly boarded a plane bound for Bombay. We met at a third friends place and set off to our friend's house. His widow sat there surrounded by her family but her face lit up when she the three of us enter the house. There were no words said. Only a long hug and a kiss but they said a lot to her and gave her real joy that his friends had gathered from long distances to be there on this sad day. We only spent a few hours in the house before leaving on our several professional journeys, but the memory of that day has remained with me for a number of reasons. On these occasions words are not often not necessary, your presence says it all.

Similarly when the daughter of a dear friend of my wife passed away, she started packing for the long journey from Washington to Delhi without a thought. She spent the next few weeks in Delhi with her friend to provide comfort and solace in those difficult times. A few years later when I was stricken with a possibly fatal heart attack, this same friend too packed away her legal practice to come and spend time with us. I still remember here massages during those dark days. Here too no words were needed. Her presence bolstered my wife no end and was of course for me a godsend.

But are there are no differences between the way friends react in times of grief? And indeed is it any different from their pleasure in our times of triumph and joy?

Men might not be physically or emotionally expressive but they derive great support from their friendships. Researchers say women's friendships are face to face: They talk, cry together, share secrets. Men's friendships are side by side: We play golf. We go to football games. 

Men have must, trust, just,and rust friends. A must friend is the best friend a man absolutely must call with earthshaking news. A trust friend is liked and trusted but not necessarily held as close as a must friend. Just friends are casual acquaintances, while rust friends have a long history together and can drift in and out of each other's lives, essentially picking up where they last left off. Understanding the role each of these types of friends play across men's lives reveals fascinating developmental patterns, such as how men cope with stress and conflict and how they make and maintain friendships, and how their friends keep them active and happy. Men's conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the feeling of things. In his research, Dr. Greif found that men generally resist high-maintenance relationships, whether with spouses, girlfriends or male pals. When picking friends, "men don't want someone who is too needy," he says.

Studies show that in their late 20s and 30s, women have a harder time staying in touch with old friends. Those are the years when they're busy starting careers and raising children, so they don't have time to gather for reunions. Money is tighter, too. But around age 40, women start reconnecting. Before the 1990s, researchers assumed this was because they had more time for friendship in their 40s, as their children became self-sufficient. But now researchers consider this middle-aged focus on friendship to be a life stage; as women plan the next chapter of their lives, they turn to friends for guidance and empathy.

Men, meanwhile, tend to build friendships until about age 30, but there's often a falloff after that. Among the reasons: Their friendships are more apt to be hurt by geographical moves and differences in career trajectories. Recent studies, however, are now finding that men in their late 40s are turning to what Dr. Grief calls "rusted" friends—longtime pals they knew when they were younger. The Internet is making it easier for them to make contact with one another.

Men compartmentalize their needs; they'd rather turn to male friends to momentarily escape from their problems. The new buzzword is "bromance." The fact is as men, we feel the need to camouflage our sensitivity, but that does not mean we are not sensitive. Men often have their own quieter ways of showing their feelings. These are evident during times of joy and grief.

But underlying even these differences lie the fundamental basis of friendship. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

As Thomas Jefferson said " friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine."

On friendship

“Let’s just be friends,” lovers proverbially say when breaking up, even if their empathy is shredding and they mainly mean to try not to sabotage each other by blabbing their secrets wholesale. Friends spread their arms, not their legs, but otherwise move in the opposite direction from sundered lovers, becoming unreserved. ..Like calories, friendships keep us warm, and serve as a badge of normality." says Edward Hoagland in this provocative article.

According to him our earliest friendships are coed, then imprecisely homoerotic, as we reach the age at which tribal peoples form cadres of hunter-warriors to protect and feed the clan, then homophobic for the sake of family life, and at last relaxed and coed again. The buddy system still underpins modern infantry warfare, and young women employ it every day on city playgrounds to keep their children safe. It’s second nature there, as on the veldt. Indeed second nature is the key to friendship. It means reading other people’s thoughts even when they are silent, and acting frequently and anonymously on charitable impulses with no quid pro quo. But it remains a mystery how we choose friends of miscellaneous ages or handicaps, or why we show idiosyncratic solicitude for one poor soul but not another.

Lending an ear is essential in mainline friendships. “I’m always here for you” is the desired pledge (like the colloquial promise “I have your back”) of best-friendship, a category often lasting at least until marriage, if not beyond. The personalities that occupy the niche—nerd or happy-go-lucky—might change according to the phases of life, but draw a nostalgic smile in our mind’s eye when we remember them. How our words waft from tongue to eardrum is not a riddle of acoustic science, but what accounts for the electricity of humor and sympathy, the flaring of angry laughter, the filling of tear ducts—all those flickering nuances that precede any riposte in the most humdrum of conversations? Friendship is one glimpse since we all know how to respond without needing to hear a single word.

The mind’s impromptu likes or dislikes, its eccentric detours, are the quirks that cement friendship, and friendship provides a stem for flowering. How, though, do neurons of the eye and ear, in practically a flash, stir what we call the heart? Love for mate, offspring, parents seems as natural as leaves sprouting; how else could humans have survived? Yet the luxuriance of love continues where no lust for self-replication is involved, no guardianship of clan. Bare survival defers to whimsy, grace, and élan where civilization takes hold. 

"We like personality, ethics, poignancy, quixotic courage" he says . "We yearn for anchorage. In adulthood, friendships originate adventitiously: at the water cooler or neighborhood association. We need roommates to get through college and afterward somebody to leave our keys and goldfish with. Friends may indulge us a little because they know our soft spots—the son in limbo after a meth arrest, the mortgage underwater, the trial separation, the cancer scare. We’ll tug a restaurant check away from a friend and bump shoulders in the parking lot, but when in love our eyes fix unqualifiedly upon the other person’s, wide open for inspection, not veiling hurt, confusion, or longing. A current flows, impulses are telegraphed, a flutter of distress crimps the mouth even before we know why. By middle age, our countenances contain a toolkit of engraved expressions, from deadpan stoicism to blithe equanimity." 

Friendship is protean. Your children, foodstuffs, and weak points are safe with me, and I’ll keep watch while you sleep, was how it all began; and primeval wellsprings of suspicion are still aroused when people lack friends. It’s why we brag about how many friends we have on Facebook, or how many people might put us up all over the world. Allies are necessary in early jobs to speak up for you, explain the ropes, and then it’s a leisurely, exploratory process where you lay your cards on the table, gradually seeing if they complement the other bloke’s. We need confidants—attention must be paid—and generally reciprocate with a core of friends whose own balance of good fortune with misfortune we can keep track of. Are the youngsters’ leaps of faith paying off, and the aging ones on an even keel? Equanimity is at first a bore, then a blessing. Most of us sculpt the modest proportions of our lives, eventually becoming responsible for them. 

“Know who your friends are” is a double-edged adage because we can take our friends for granted, hurting their feelings because of not being afraid of them, whereupon repairs are more urgent than when offending a foe. Friends change venue, blow hot or cold, but we must unburden ourselves, if only in a bar, touching base on the fly. It eases the heart, not simply as a metaphor—which is another mystery: why a high-five matters to one’s very health. Offloading grievances or grief is like conscripting an extra pair of arms to lift a sack of stones. 

We come to trust in the validity of telepathic promptings without wishing to peel back the anatomy of the riddle, as if that might possibly queer the deal. When faced with a thyroid biopsy or an exasperatingly interminable divorce, it’s essential to have friends to call upon to squawk, Do you know what’s happened?And we triage or triangulate them accordingly into good-news guys, bad-news guys, and others whose experiences somehow parallel ours. Intimates can be like money in the bank or names to drop, tipsters or bosom buddies of the sort you spout off to as a test audience before making a fool of yourself in front of a less charitable crowd. A caring soul to unstopper our disappointments with—childhood and evolution have seeded that yearning or throwback imperative in us. Even when fibbing, it’s a blessing to unburden oneself. 

The pep of a smile is communicable, and a reliable temper will serve for a flood of words, particularly at a kitchen table, with mugs of the milk of human kindness served. Life is potentially centrifugal; what we want is an anchor chain. We “lean on” friends as a form of gravity, yet at other times ask their help in flotation. And our pity extends to other species, rooting for birds nesting under the eaves or a limping dog whose lifespan is so regrettably briefer than ours. 

Cyberspace spins the compass. Distances contract, numbers expand, with banter the coin of the realm, and better than talking to yourself. Information substitutes for gesture, facial expression, and body language, and close-quarters telepathic communications are being superseded by the new technology, whereby people email each other from adjoining cubicles or cell-phone third parties while strolling side by side with their dearest friend. 

We want to feel twinned for a while with people of the same age and preoccupations, facing the enigmas of adolescence, marriage, children, the rat race, until the disquiet of aging sets in. But friendship is a facet of love, which means that scientists, who are devotees of the bias that “I think, therefore I am,” have not been much intrigued by it, just as, without appropriate outcry, they’ve let so many species vanish from the earth.

We don’t cogitate in friendship. Smiles of recognition spring from mouth to mouth with wandlike exactitude. Life is impromptu: the toothache that precedes bridgework; the colonel who chose not to court-martial us; the bewilderment when a job or spouse dissolves. As nature is dissolved, people foster unusual intimacies with pets also, hugging their dogs more and more, breeding them into toys, talking to a cockatiel caged in the living room, flying to a climate where they can swim with a dolphin or snorkel over coral reefs before these have bleached into skeletons. 

Friendship provokes us to pause a moment, shrug off our workaday carapace, and just be flesh and blood. Like a guardian spirit, a friend may ask and then reorient us a bit, a leverage like New Year’s Eve. Traction, context: to remain among the living, hugged and germane, is the idea. 

Indeed friendship  the nectar of life.

The joy of discovery

The world is a place filled with wonder and possibility. It is a place with all kinds of amazing, weird, quirky, natural and sometimes crazy things just waiting to be discovered. If children learn how to discover new things when they're young, they will grow up in a world with possibility and hope. They will grow up seeing the world as an adventurous place just waiting to be explored. 

Children are naturally such curious creatures. They explore, question, and wonder, and by doing so, learn. From the moment of birth, likely even before, humans are drawn to new things. When we are curious about something new, we want to explore it. And while exploring we discover. 

By turning the light switch on and off over and over again, the toddler is learning about cause and effect. By pouring water into a dozen different-shaped containers and on the floor and over clothes, the 4-year-old is learning pre-concepts of mass and volume. A child discovers the sweetness of chocolate, the bitterness of lemon, the heat of the radiator, and the cold of ice only by trying them out.

If a child stays curious, he will continue to explore and discover. The 5-year-old finds tadpoles in a tiny pool of mud on the playground. This discovery gives him pleasure. When he experiences the joy of discovery, he will want to repeat his exploration of the pond. [Pleasure leads to repetition.] Each day, he and his classmates return. The tadpoles grow legs. [Repetition leads to mastery.] The children learn that tadpoles become frogs — a concrete example of a complex biological process. Mastery — in this case, understanding that tadpoles become frogs — leads to confidence. Confidence increases a willingness to act on curiosity — to explore, discover, and learn. "Can we bring tadpoles into the class? How do other baby animals grow up? Why don’t dog babies lose their tails?" This positive cycle of learning is fueled by curiosity and the pleasure that comes from discovery and mastery.

What is most pleasurable about discovery and mastery is sharing it with someone else. ("Dad, come look! Tadpoles!") We are social creatures. The most positive reinforcement — the greatest reward and the greatest pleasure — comes from the adoring and admiring gaze, comments and support from someone we love and respect. Dad smiles, claps, and comments, " You are great. Look at all these tadpoles! You are our science expert!" This rewarding approval causes a surge of pleasure and pride that can sustain the child through new challenges and frustrations. Approval can generalize and help build confidence and self-esteem. So later in the day, when this boy is struggling with the introduction of simple math concepts, rather than eroding his esteem by thinking, "I’m stupid, I don’t understand," he can think, "I don’t get this, but I’m the one who knows about tadpoles."

Unfortunately for too many children, curiosity fades. And curiosity dimmed is a future denied. Our potential — emotional, social, and cognitive — is expressed through the quantity and quality of our experiences. And the less-curious child will make fewer new friends, join fewer social groups, read fewer books, and take fewer hikes. The less-curious child is harder to teach because he is harder to inspire, enthuse, and motivate.

There are three common ways adults constrain or even crush the enthusiastic exploration of the curious child: 

Fear: Fear kills curiosity. When the child's world is chaotic or when he is afraid, he will not like novelty. He will seek the familiar, staying in his comfort zone, unwilling to leave and explore new things. Children impacted by war, natural disasters, family distress, or violence all have their curiosity crushed.

Disapproval: "Don’t touch. Don’t climb. Don’t yell. Don’t take that apart. Don’t get dirty. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t." Children sense and respond to our fears, biases, and attitudes. If we convey a sense of disgust at the mud on their shoes and the slime on their hands, their discovery of tadpoles will be diminished.

Absence: The presence of a caring, invested adult provides two things essential for optimal exploration: 1) a sense of safety from which to set out to discover new things and 2) the capacity to share the discovery and, thereby, get the pleasure and reinforcement from that discovery.

So how do we encourage curiosity and discovery of new things in our children:

      1. Expose them to as many new experiences as possible. The idea is to expose your child to as many opportunities as possible. Your child may discover a passion for something they hadn't considered before. Try activities in a variety of areas from nature to technology and theatrical to scientific. By exposing children to as many new experiences as possible allows them to explore a wide range of opportunities. It will develop in them a unique curiosity in the world around them. It teaches them an important skill too--to be open to discovering new things.

      2. Make as many books and other resource material available to children as possible. Sometimes kids simply haven't been exposed to new ideas, activities and opportunities, so it is hard for them to know what is even out there for them to discover. By taking kids to the library, subscribing to various magazines and keeping books and other reference and resource material on hand kids can open their imagination and develop a natural interest and ability in discovering new things. It's also a good idea to have writing and drawing material on hand so that kids can have a place to collect thoughts and images of their own.

      3. Show a genuine interest in what children care about. If you praise and acknowledge the interests of a child, you teach them that their opinions are valuable and worth the attention of other's. It allows them to be proud of the world in which they live. By showing a genuine interest in what children care about, you show them that discovering new things is worthwhile and fun.

      4. Share your interests with children. By sharing your interests with children it allows them to see the world through someone else's eyes. It encourages them to consider the world as you see it, which may inspire them to discover new things. It also allows them to understand that everyone has the ability to discover new things and that it is a natural way to experience the world.

      5. Above all be positive and open with children about the world around them. Show an ability to be interested in new things yourself and the children around you will adopt a similar attitude. And maybe the grin of delight that you see below on Nikhil's face may also become yours!

Here is my grandson Nikhil discovering the joys of just opening the the X box:

The joy of discovery

 I wonder what does this button do?

Does it need something else t work – maybe a battery?

Aha! I got it. Will it open if I press the button.

Here we go

Yay, It works

See Dad, I can open your x box

And now we can play together, yes?

Old age blues

Subject: Fwd: A Little Poem, so true it hurts!

My old friend of over six decades sent me this poem: too true and too painful!!

Something for all of us over the age of ............. never mind!

Another year is nearly past And we're all a little older. Last summer felt hotter And winter seems much colder. There was a time not long ago When life was quite a blast. Now I fully understand About 'Living in the Past' We used to go to weddings, Football games and lunches. Now we go to funeral homes And after-funeral brunches. We used to have hangovers, From parties that were gay. Now we suffer body aches And wile the night away. We used to go out dining, And couldn't get our fill. Now we ask for doggie bags, Come home and take a pill. We used to often travel To places near and far. Now we get sore asses From riding in the car. We used to go to nightclubs And drink a little booze. Now we stay home at nightAnd watch the evening news. That, my friend is how life is, And now my tale is told. So, enjoy each day and live it up... Before you're too damned old!

Advice you dont need - whom to marry

Did you know that you can really strategize the whole area of marriage and having kids from the get go. Here in an article,  Penelope Trunk offers her take on what single women need to do as they confront the most difficult choices in life: to be a breadwinner or be a stay at home mom.

The most difficult of these choices is if you want to work full-time when you have kids then you had better plan on having a huge job that you love. Because nothing else will seem worth it to put yourself and your family through what they will have to go through.

Of course the alternative is to marry a stay at home husband. Let him look after the kids while you climb the career ladder. Let’s say you’re sure you want a big job while you have kids. The first thing is that you will need is a stay-at-home husband. Also, note that research shows that people who have kids and a stay-at-home spouse advance at a much, much higher rate than people who don’t.

But if  you can't nab one of those stay at home dads, you will need instead round-the-clock nannies. Women who have kids and a big job and no stay-at-home husband generally have two nannies, and a household staff, because you need to be covered every second of every day because you don’t know what work will need. 

There is no right answer, but you will need to decide whether you want a stay at home husband or a platoon of nannies when you are picking a husband. If you are picking the two-nanny route, you will need to find a husband who earns more than you. Statistically your marriage is high risk if you and your husband are both in the workforce and you earn more than him because surveys show that you will resent him. This is not logical, or social, it is primal. Statistically, you will marry a guy who does not make as much as you and then you will have kids and get a divorce. Because women hate the feeling of out-earning their husbands.

 If you want a stay-at-home dad type to complement your big job, pick a guy who will  most likely be fulfilled taking care of kids. And, bonus: these guys probably weren’t going to make a lot of money anyway, so you it’s good for them to be with a breadwinner.

If you want to be home with your kids, you’re going to need a solid plan to make that happen. Pew Research finds that about 60% of all working women with kids want to work part-time and be home with their kids part-time. (Note that Macleans magazine reportsthat women with kids who work part-time are the happiest in the world.) Gallup reports that about 40% of women don’t want to work at all. 

 Let’s assume you want to work part-time and have kids as well, since this is the more complicated of the two scenarios. The problem with this scenario is that part-time jobs don’t offer advancement or a lot of money, so you need to be with a guy who will work full-time.  If the guy is working full-time, then he is not going to do all the parenting stuff. You are. So you are working part-time and you are a full-time parent. You will have to work hard to not get resentful about this. And really, who could blame you? The best antidote for this resentment is money. If the guy makes a lot of money you can hire people to help you and then you don’t have to be upset that the guy is not helping you.

Or not. Or you can just let the guy go to his job, which, you will certainly know, is way easier than taking care of kids, because every job in the whole world is easier than taking care of kids, and you will be home doing everything else. Maybe you will have a part-time job, but that will not be the focus of your energy because the stuff at home is way harder than your part-time job. Your part-time job will be a break from the hard stuff. So pick a guy who will earn enough to ensure that you are not pissed.

Also, pick a guy who will earn enough so that you don’t have to work. Because statistically speaking, you will not want a full-time job, and you definitely won’t want a job where you have to earn six figures, because that’s way more than full-time. There will be people who say you can’t choose who you fall in love with. This is a lie, of course. There are a million people you could fall in love with. If one is impractical, just go find another. There will be people who say they don’t know what they want until they see who they marry.  Most people just will not like these choices. Nothing here is good. It’s reality, and of course it’s not as good as fantasy. 

The only good, real thing is that you have choices, and you can figure out who you are and what you need and you can get what you need.