Puritanical Sri Lanka

If you visit Sri Lanka, you will find a society that, on the surface at least, is quite modern especially when it comes to the status of women. Women have access to education and occupy high levels of the government and private sectors and there are few restrictions on their movement. Women can and do go about alone, drive, and do pretty much anything that men do. You will see women everywhere, dressed in all manner of styles from the latest western fashions to traditional clothing.
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The Republican debates were even wilder than we thought

Michael Grunwald writes that the Republican debates were so off-the-wall that many things that would normally have caused a sensation were completely ignored because of all the attention paid to Donald Trump’s utterances and the sniping by the candidates at each other, and that the only reason he noticed them at all was because he read through the transcripts.
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Professional laughers

I was agreeing with a friend that the canned laughter that is heard on TV comedies is an abomination The worst ones are the really canned ones, laughs that are pre-recorded and then played at the times when the writers think the audience should laugh. These annoying laughs become even worse if you yourself are not watching the program because the phoniness becomes more obvious. If people are watching a program while I am in the next room, the canned laughter becomes so annoying that I have to move to a distant room just to get out of earshot.
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Documentary on solving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Blogging will be light during the holiday break but if you too have time on your hands, I think many people will find enjoyable this 46-minute documentary made (I think) in 1997 that looks at Andrew Wiles’s quest to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. I did not understand almost all of the sophisticated mathematics involved but that did not matter.
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Reason’s Greetings!

Best wishes to all the blog’s readers for the holiday season, if and however you celebrate it, in whatever form you prefer to do so. I came across this short film featuring Mog the cat, a character created by Judith Kerr. Mog is the star of a series of children’s books. This holiday season the British grocery chain Sainsbury’s produced this film featuring a CGI version of the cat. I thought it was pretty good.
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This unhinged rant is a thing of beauty

Two young Brazilian men were filming a sketch for their YouTube comedy channel on a public street with a backdrop of an airplane when a woman driving by stopped and started ranting at them for being terrorists. It was quite incredible the amount of obscenities, racism, religious rubbish, and homophobic slurs she managed to cram into just a few minutes. I was impressed at how well the two men took it, managing to laugh at her while filming her.
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Balmy weather in the northeast US

Those of us who live in the northeast of the US have all been remarking on how warm it has been, with temperatures often running at twenty degrees Fahrenheit over normal. Today is expected to be in the mid 60s, about 30 degrees above normal. It is truly strange to see people wearing shorts and walking their dogs past green lawns on Christmas Eve in Cleveland. In response to yesterday’s post, commenters who live in Australia also weighed in with how much of a heat wave they are going through right now.
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