I’m back! And am now a grandfather!

I have just returned from a trip to welcome our first grandchild! He was born on Tuesday and we managed to get there in time to see him a couple of hours after he was born. Everything went well and I had a wonderful few days with him and his parents.

Being a grandfather is a strangely wonderful experience, hard to describe really. It definitely feels like the passing of the baton to a new generation, more so than with the birth of your own children, because you are now much older and you know that you have not many years left to live. When your own children are born, you think that you will be around long enough to protect them until they reach adulthood. With grandchildren, you realize that your children have that responsibility because it is unlikely that you will be there that long.

While I have always had the sense that we have a duty to leave the world in a better place for future generations, that feeling gets even stronger when you see a grandchild entering it now and wonder what it will be like for him when he grows up.

TV Review: Sherlock: The Lying Detective (no spoilers)

The second episode in the latest series was shown on PBS on Sunday and is now available online. This was a good episode, even if Sherlock was more manic than usual. There were, as has become the custom, some major surprises at the end that left a lot of questions open, presumably to be resolved in the final episode of this series to be shown on Sunday. I am not sure if that marks the end of the run for this show or whether future series are scheduled. The two main stars have other engagements and they may not want to be too identified with their roles here.
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Cyrano was a man before his time

Most people are familiar with the fictional title character in the play Cyrano de Bergerac, a man who was so self-conscious about his big nose that he hesitated to declare his love for the beautiful Roxanne because he thought it was hopeless. However he was willing to compose beautiful love letters that Christian, his inarticulate rival for Roxanne’s affections, could pass off as his own, and Roxanne is so charmed by Christian’s borrowed eloquence that she falls in love with him. We might think that Cyrano was a bit of a dope to be so self-sacrificing but people can do surprising things when they are in love.
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Is twice-boiled water bad for tea?

The lively discussion that followed my post on how the British really cared about their tea reminded me of an issue that I had idly thought about some time ago when I visited relatives in New Zealand. They are Sri Lankan and thus, like the British, take their tea seriously so that they make sure that the ‘tea things’ (tea kettle, tea pot, tea, sugar, milk, cups, strainer, and spoons) are located in prominent and easily accessible places in the kitchen so that no one dies due to tea-deprivation. Their tea kettle is a powerful electric one that heats water very quickly, not the wimpy one that I have that you heat on the stove.
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Does anonymity worsen online behavior?

The fact that the internet seems to have a large number of people who indulge in abusive behavior towards others is hardly news. Why people behave this way is not clear. My own theory is similar to what I think about sports. My high school in Sri Lanka had a strong sports emphasis, since it was modeled on British public schools that took seriously the motto mens sana in corpore sano (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”). One used to constantly hear the phrase that playing sports builds character but I always doubted that. It seemed to me that what sports did was reveal character, since on the athletic field, one’s behavior was now visible to large number of people.
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The British are really serious about their tea

While Australians seem to really care about their beer, the British love their tea. I have commented before that you cannot watch British TV shows without being impressed by the major role that tea plays in them. People are always either drinking or making tea and as soon as anyone enters someone else’s home, even if it is a police officer investigating a crime, the first question is whether they would like a cup of tea. They seem to drink it by the gallon.
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Social pressure to drink alcohol

I do not drink alcohol. I have no objections to it and do on occasion drink a beer or some wine but usually only because there is no alternative or the occasion is festive, like toasting someone. My reasons for not drinking are that I do not enjoy the taste of alcohol and on one occasion when I had a little too much, I did not enjoy the sensation of being lightheaded and losing control.
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The problem with repealing Obamacare

The health plan popularly known as Obamacare is clunky and confusing but the big benefit that made it worthwhile (at least as a stop-gap until a single-payer system was implemented) was that tens of millions of previously uninsured people were now able to get access to health care. Three other major benefits were that people could not be denied coverage for so-called pre-existence conditions (an appalling feature of previous plans that insurance companies heavily exploited to deny coverage for many people) children could stay on their parents’ plans until they were 26, and the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid.
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