Rain at night, rain at dawn

It looks like the best part of the rains have passed the Southern California region but I shall not forget the nostalgic and intimate moments last night when I slept to the sound of rain as it came down in gentle and hesitant questions. In both Urbana and here in Pasadena, I have been fortunate to live in apartments where the windows face foliage of some form and the hashing noise made as little pellets of water make love to womanly fall leaves is heavenly music streaming through the mesh and into the room. My joy was compounded manifold when I awoke to morning rains -- the purest manifestation of a celestial insomnia. As much as I am thankful for Pasadena's plentiful sun I do yearn for weeks if not months of incessant downpour.

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Give me victory, or give me death

Every sport needs a miracle encounter to soften its worst detractors. With the tantalising duels between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees the past few days, baseball has closed the deal as far as I am concerned. I shall continue to hold that it is largely a boring game, a trifle more thick-skulled and much less aesthetic version of its trans-Atlantic counterpart and precursor but the spirit and spectacle of an underperforming team that has given its fans heartbreaks for the last eighty years coming back from three games down to vanquish its patronising, complacent rivals in the last four eventually to go to the final series deserves all the respect and wide-eyed adulation it gets.

BBC on its website has an intriguing prioritisation when it comes to its sports items. While cricket, football, rugby, motorsport, tennis, athletics, golf and heck, even boxing get separate top-level folders the remaining are all bracketed under a secondary and very Plebeian-sounding "other_sports" folder. Nonetheless, either in a sign of acknowledgement of the fan-following it has in the United States or in yet another symbol of its sneering nose-thumbs at everything American (perhaps particularly their sports) baseball, American football and basketball are all clumped together under "us_sport" in "other_sports".

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Pride and Prejudice, according to Kieran Healy and Brad DeLong

Both Crooked Timber and Brad DeLong's weblogs are ones that I read frequently, though I can only approve of the former as the latter oftentimes is rather shrill and rabid in its tone. Crooked Timber and Marginal Revolution are some of the shining examples of the notion of "group blogs" where a collection of individuals, most often academics, come together and share duties in expressing opinions as well as offering many insights to the relevance of sociology and economics, more or less respectively, to common-day trivialities. Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy recently considered, in fact revisited the topic of May-December marriages which is a rather intriguing and very smart title/epithet to marriages that have a large age gap between the husband and wife. Kieran Healy cites the case of Charlotte Lucas marrying Mr. Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as one in support of his contention that the pattern of institutionalised and constrained marriages is a relic of times old and forgotten. While that is debatable in itself given the widely prevalent notion of arranged marriages in India, an issue I have given much thought and time to and would like to muse on at some point in time, what is even more questionable is his assertion that "Saying that people-F�decisions reflect the best choice available under the circumstances would be-A cold comfort for, say, all the Charlotte Lucases who choose to marry their Mr Collins." I am not sure I could agree with that since from my understanding of the book, Charlotte Lucas does indeed believe that her accepting Mr. Collins' proposal would give her the best chance of, what Jane Austen refers rather condescendingly to as, "marrying well". Charlotte's resignation and supposedly rather downbeat appraisal of her own talents and charms is what gives Elizabeth much consternation when she learns of the proposal. Elizabeth is perhaps at odds to understand that Charlotte has accepted the proposal out of a sense of urgency given her age and, again her prospects. As an aside I think Charlotte Lucas' gentle and pragmatic persona is in sharp contrast to that of the termagant and impish Mrs. Bennet. So, I thought it justified that Brad DeLong should object to Kieran Healy's remarks though I found myself agreeing with Kieran Healy's neat rebuttal in the same page. I do believe that Brad DeLong has misread Charlotte Lucas' intention and cannot convince myself of Brad DeLong's view that "Charlotte Lucas marries happily". This does point to Austen's genius in gauging and evocatively portraying the social mores and history of her time but more importantly it brings out in full force the strength of her writing that people should continue to defend vigorously their perceptions of her characters.

Red Sox reach World Series

BBC's Other Sport (sic)

BBC's US Sports coverage

Google Answers on May-December marriages

When the wife is 'December'

Kieran Healy on May-December marriages

Brad DeLong weighs in on Charlotte Lucas

April 2004

January 2004 - March 2004

October 2003 - January 2004

July 2003 - October 2003

May 2003 - June 2003