The blog mela is tomorrow. Please rush in your entries.
Thank you.

I will be in Ohio for three weeks or so starting from 2nd February as a follow-up to my paunch reduction programme. I also hope to find out firsthand who actually won the elections. In the unlikely event that anyone actually stays there and has survived the recent snowstorms, please leave a comment here.

Why did the Mallu go to see Kisna?
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Please remember to submit Blog Mela entries for this week. Go here to submit. I won’t be able to make it the Republic Day special I want it to be with this response.

My erstwhile coblogger, Pradeep Ravikumar has a post arguing that our brains aren’t designed to solve abstract mathematical problems, but they have evolved to be good at predicting the behaviours of other living beings. That’s a good point, and I can substantiate that with a puzzle.
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Swami has posted a probability puzzle that is also my favourite. I know the answer. You folks can have a try.

I am happy to inform the junta that Kingsley lost to me in the battle of the taglines. It just shows what one man armed with a good tagline can achieve. My opponent’s blog has had 31 taglines in its lifetime and it couldn’t compete with the simple and expressive power of a well-chosen tagline.

Truly is it said, “Blessed are those with a fabulously good tagline, for a Blogjet’s Weblog client for Windows worth $19.95 awaits them in paradise.” Kingsley can take solace in the fact that he lost to another member of the Cartel. Such people will surely find paradise awaiting them in the Hereafter.

Congratulations to all the other winners too. As usual, the Holy Cartel has made a strong showing, with Madman picking up two awards, Amit Varma winning one and Ravages winning none.

It looks like I have been proved spectacularly wrong about the plagiarism thing. The guy is a slimeball and was really worth pursuing. Visit Amit Varma’s post for the full details. It is a bit like arresting Al Capone for tax fraud. Or, more correctly, uncovering tax fraud, investigating it, and finding an entire mafia operation run by Al Capone. The Indian blogosphere has really done a good job of pursuing him.

The fifth Blog Mela of the year 2005 shall be put up here at The Examined Life on Friday 28 January 2005 unless the fates decree otherwise, in which case I shall make every attempt to put it up at the latest by Monday, the 1st of February 2005. The rules for submission are the same as usual. You can submit your entries as a comment to this post. However, read the whole post once, for I wish to add a couple of special sections to this event.
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When I talked of the quote being ungoogleable, I wasn’t talking of the technical difficulty of composing the query in google. I was talking of the fact that there are so many versions of the quote available. Nonetheless, a helpful reader Ramesh R has given me the information that google accepts the wildcard *. So you can search for “What do they know of * who only * know” Neat no?

Here is his mail with some interesting historical information:
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I know what you people have come looking for, but you won’t get it. Instead, you get a dumb joke you probably won’t understand.

What does a Maharashtrian say when his blog dies?
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With reference to the post below, reader Avinash wants to know if I am doing those things in that order.
My dear fellow, simultaneously. I am not working and gymming at the same time, but I am sleeping and doing everything else except gymming together. You see, gymming makes me tired and when I am tired, endorphins rush in to make me feel good and that leaves me in a happy and dreamlike state. So I am half asleep all the time except in the night, when I am fully asleep. As a result, I have completely lost the ability to take anything seriously. I am also unable to distinguish between dreams and reality.

For example, I recently dreamt that a newspaper found out that someone had made it a practice of taking photostat copies of every day’s paper with the credits and the masthead whitened away and sitting in the middle of a desert everyday and handing out free copies to anyone who wanted one. The only thing is, no one actually went to him because he was in the middle of a desert. The newspaper got so worked up about this that it published the name and address of the person and built a highway to the place where he sat, so that readers could go there and heap scorn on him and shame him into desisting. Crazy dream no?