Quirky lists

It’s July 8^th today: Shilpi has just reminded me that my blog is now five years old (see the post titled ‘Four years old’ written a year ago). How fast time passes, really. I can hardly believe that I have been doing this without a break for five whole years! Many thanks to all the readers who have kept me going all this time by visiting regularly and commenting frequently. I hope they too want this blog to continue for many more years, as I do.

As some people might have noticed already, I have recently added a blog titled ‘Listverse’ on my blog-roll. The fellow’s strongly idiosyncratic, of course, but he is harmless, and clever, and wicked, and though I don’t always agree with him (as I commented on his recent post about why he thinks newspapers are on the way out), I generally enjoy the slightly weird lists that he keeps putting up. He’s been teaching me a thing or two, too (as my daughter has written in her own recent blogpost). His latest post is ‘10 Industries that thrive on holidays’, and I relished the hard-hitting cynical tone so much that I must draw my readers’ attention to it (do read some of the comments, too: so many people have nothing to say to him except ‘I hate you’!).

Among other things, it should make you think: the very fact that these ten industries are thriving as never before should give the lie to the oft-repeated claim that people these days are terribly busy all the time. With so many holidays, and with so many people having both the leisure and the money to throw at all those holidays, one can only sigh to think that there used to be a time when most people had to work most of the time just to make a bare living (I have been reading Dickens lately, and his world seems light years away). That’s progress for you.

While the party lasts.