Out-of-the-box ideas – boxed!

To my delight, I recently located this review filed by me on February 7, 2004 a thttp://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3AOH1V0YEH3WO/ref=cm_pdp_profile_reviews/102-3668932-4279329?ie=UTF8&sort%5Fby=MostRecentReview

'Parlour cards' smacks of after-dinner liquer and Cuban cigars - not my cup of tea (pardon the mixed metaphor!) mainly because I don't move in those haloed Page 3 corridors. I bought After-dinner Freud and After-dinner Shakespeare - sight unseen as it were - mainly because the form of packaging and presentation fascinated me. It was only later at home that I discovered what a treasure I had stumbled upon unwittingly. Dr Joseph Aguayo and his Editors have picked out pertinent and pithy brush strokes from Freud's life to create a quick mental sketch of the last of the deliverers of "the three blows to man's pride". For instance, Card #22 tells us that Mrs Freud thought her husband's ideas were "a form of pornography". Don't waste time reading the review. Get your own set of the parlour cards and enjoy! (No, I'm not on the payroll of Becker & Mayer who helped to shape these brilliant 'packaged books'.)

P.S.: I recall that I bought both the delightful products from Strand Book Stall a few years back at (probably) Rs.100/- (about $2.50) each.

P.S. #2: My earlier review of God of Small Things is however missing at the Amazon website. It’s now members only’, I guess. The surviving reniew was written after I bought Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability a couple of years back.

English idiom. Spanish origin.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. When Don Quixote, the “first modern” novel by Shakespeare’s Spanish contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), and the most widely published book in the world after the Bible, was rendered into English, several now well-known idiomatic expressions entered the linguistic mainstream. Noteworthy among these are: "sky's the limit"; "thanks for nothing"; "a finger in every pie"; "paid in his own coin"; "a wild-goose chase"; "mind your own business"; "think before you speak"; "forgive and forget"; "to smell a rat"; "turning over a new leaf"; "the haves and have-nots"; "born with a silver spoon in his mouth"; "the pot calling the kettle black"; and "you've seen nothing yet." Where did I find this gem? In the serendipitous ocean that’s the World Wide Web. http://coloquio.com/famosos/cervante.html.
P.S. : I have a rather unusual Shakespeareana of contemporary origin: After-Dinner Shakespeare by Barry Kraft, a set of one hundred parlour cards with questions and answers about the playwright and his works. It is published by Viking. I got it from Strand Book Stall along with a similar product on Freud of which I wrote in the previous post.

Seinfeld’s nemesis (“Hello, Newman.”) did it, too.

Reading other (preferably famous) peoples’ letters fascinates me no end. There’s something liberating, I find, about letter writing. It sorta lets your guard slip and, for maybe a brief instant, the ‘real’ person can be glimpsed. The last two collections of celebrity letters I read were Graham Greene’s letters to newspapers and Sigmund Freud’s personal correspondence. Freud’s son, Ernst, has selected the letters. (“As a letter writer, my father was unusually prolific and conscientious,” is his fond comment.) Among his world-renowned correspondents were people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Havelock Ellis, Stefan Zweig, Maria Montessori, HG Wells, Romain Rolland, Carl G Jung and Otto Rank among others. The Freud who comes across through in his letters is totally unlike the brooding and melancholy persona I had imagined him to be. He’s childlike, poetic, open, full of joie de vivre, tenderness and wonderment, especially when he’s writing to his fiancée, Martha Bernays. Freud’s obit by (Monday, 25 September 1939) can be found at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/healthmindandbody/story/0,6000,332994,00.html. P.S.: One of my prized finds is After-Dinner Freud by Joseph Aguayo, Ph.D. It’s a set of one hundred parlour cards with questions and answers on the Father of Psychoanalysis, published by Viking. Fascinating stuff![Related link: Saturday, May 6, 2006. Posted at 8:33 P.M. ‘Pen pal. Who me?‘]