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IIPM students visiting Webster University, Geneva

I was given a gift this week by one of a couple groups visiting Switzerland from IIPM, a business school in India. I made a presentation on managing your online life and at the end they handed me a figure of Ganesh, a Hindu god, but I didn’t know the name until I sent a photo to a friend I was sure would know.

Mary’s cheerful reply came rushing back from New York, with great enthusiasm for elephants. It made me wish the Republicans had not borrowed them. Fortunately, they are too big even for the Republican Party, but just to balance the picture, here is another angle on elephants (thanks, Mary) designed to brighten your day:

Ganesh, from India, visiting Perroy, Switzerland, with Lake Geneva in the background

It all started back in January when we sold our car to a guy in Pennsylvania. I had to meet him in New Jersey one morning to give him some paperwork on the car, and H. gave me his name: Karthik Ganesh. Ganesh! I thought, the god of good fortune and the remover of obstacles. This is good! So I drive an hour and meet him in a parking lot and he’s a very nice Indian man, and he says “You people have been so nice. I’m a web programmer and I’ll make you a free web site.” So I thought “There you are – he is the god of good fortune!”

I drive home and stop at the bank to do some transactions and I went to talk with my usual bank officer and she’s says “Oh, I’m just leaving, but you can talk to Noshina here.” So I sit down at the desk and see that her name is Noshina Babar. Hmmm, another elephant, thinks I. This is weird.

Then the next morning I’m watching the Today Show and they have the big opening of a Broadway show about Horton the elephant. And I’m thinking, this is getting weirder. And that’s when they started turning up all over the place, in ads, emails, everywhere!

One real jaw dropper was one morning when I got an email from the East West bookstore in New York, a new age kind of place, promoting gifts for father’s day. They had a dvd called “Ashes and snow” that the description said was about humans’ connection to animals. I’m interested in that, so I click on it and this website opens up that was SO beautiful and all images of elephants!

Mary at the Elephant Bar, Arizona

Then one morning i was reading the cnn.com headlines and there was something about a tornado that had ripped through a Kansas neighborhood, so I click on that story and there is a picture of an elephant running through someone’s backyard! The tornado had freed him from his circus. And the night before the Colbert Report had done a report on a new candidate for president from the Libertarian Party, and they show a picture of Babar! oops, he says, that should be Bob Barr (who was the real candidate.)

This stuff just kept going on and on and on, and it was kind of fun! It subsided during the summer but i hope it starts again. They made me so happy!

So thanks for the morning Ganesh! let’s hope he looks kindly upon the stock market today.

Postscript: Mary wrote again two days later, that the elephants-everywhere phenomenon had started again. “Reading the New Yorker while waiting for my car’s oil change I opened to a cartoon of the blind men and the elephant, and a few pages later read that there is an exhibit at the Morgan library called “drawing Babar” which is early sketchbooks.

“AND on the way back from my golf lesson this morning on the radio there came a song called TUSK by Fleetwood Mac! they’re everywhere!”

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