Brown Motion

It is time for America to get into a garment to be used only once in a lifetime and beg for candy.  Aka Halloween.  Said garment is identified as a costume and can be time consuming to procure and wear depending on the level of enthusiasm of the beggar.  Usually children; some adults who still milk this tradition hiding behind a mask. This time as before I have oft wondered about the idea of costumes.  I get when you are on stage in a play or a movie that costumes are integral to the framing of the story. You need Stallone to have lot of ketchup marking the spots he is bleeding and the shirt needs to be ripped enough to show his ripped rib cage else we cannot believe he just fought like a badass. But today when I read about the Pope appointing a first ever black American as Cardinal I was struck by the same question.  Especially as I read the story with some graphics and photos of the two. The Catholic religion as any other preaches the virtue of being human....

When I was growing up in India I remember being gifted an odd piece of cloth by an older relative. That oft came with instructions to use it as a input for what would become a shirt or trouser. Thus the onus to convert raw material to finished good was left on the giftee. The giftor merely showed up with a certain rectangle of their choosing in terms of color or fabric and divined that the gifted gleefully accept this gesture of generosity. I found this proces retarded and somehow arbitrary. What if I needed was a good bicycle or a pair of socks instead? The idea of gift cards for generic stores was yet to reach Indian shores. Today one could get a gift card to appear politically correct and hand it to the giftee and let the have free rein on whether to buy tobacco, guns or a shirt with the funds. Of course certin smart elders just handed me cash. I respect that. For one they believed that I knew what cash was and how it could be used. Also it left me to choose the outcome o...