Kalman and Observation of Everyday Life

 One would be hard pressed to read through Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty while only paying attention to the writing. The illustrations on each page exhibit a certain sense of spontaneity: some pictures relate to the text on each page, while others don’t. A quote that stood out to me by Kalman comes when she writes, “If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour” (Kalman 37). This idea of people-watching plays well with illustrations in that they both revolve around observation of the unexpected. In both standing on a street corner for thirty minutes and turning a page in Kalman’s book, you can’t be too sure what you will see. I have experienced this personally since my roommate throughout my years at Loyola is a sociology major. Because of this, sometimes while eating lunch at Iggy’s I would just sit with him while he worked on an assignment where he had to watch how people socialized while eating. While this is the only immediate example I can think of, I’m sure we can all think of other examples of times where we just sat on a bench somewhere and watched people walk by. This notion of observation is what Kalman plays off of. This also ties in well with our previous discussions of humor. Thinking about Sedaris, he mentioned that a lot of humorous content simply comes to him while he is at a book signing. This is also a form of people-watching. The notion of the unexpected that comes from people-watching also fits in well with the Incongruity Theory of Humor from Kant in that we find the unexpected to be humorous.