Swearing makes you impotent: official

Those readers who like the spoken language liberally peppered with expletives and barrack-room terminology had better clean up their act, a Russian scientist has warned, because excessive swearing causes women to turn into blokes and blokes to lose wood.
The shocking revelation comes courtesy of Gennady Cheurin’s team at the Yekaterinburg Centre for Ecological Safety and Survival. Cheurin made the discovery after conducting ground-breaking research into the effect of bad language on water. The theory goes that water can be influenced by “negative vibes”, and the team spent several hours hurling abuse at a glass of the stuff. This Devil’s liquid was then sprinkled on wheat seeds – of which just 48 per cent subsequently germinated. Seeds favoured with water from natural springs, on the other hand, enjoyed a 93 per cent germination rate.

…
he quickly turned his attentions to the effect of swearing on the perpetrators themselves: “We then looked at heavy swearers, and found whenever men use these words in their daily life, this immediately leads to sexual dysfunctions, i.e. impotence. If a woman uses these words in her daily speech, she slowly begins transforming into a man, getting more hair and muscles.”

Show us examples of their blocking free trade by lobbying with the government.

So now we have a situation where if you are a foreign company with experience in running an airline, you can’t invest in India, but a private airline in India can raise equity from abroad. How did we get into this ridiculous situation? Because Jet, Sahara, etc. want it that way of course.

I am utterly disappointed with my countless Mallu readers. If the most literate state in India cannot identify answer a question concerning its authors properly, then I don’t know what to say. You should all go drown in the Arabian sea and let the rest of your countrymen use your pristine unspoilt homeland as a holiday resort.

The connection I was talking of was this. The district where Veerappan lived and died was Dharmapuri. That should have immediately reminded you of O V Vijayan’s novel Saga of Dharmapuri. The book is a must-read for all Nehru-haters. It is an allegory about India caught between two superpowers. The treatment of Nehru and the communists has to be read to be believed. In the book, Nehru’s courtiers are depicted as eating his shit – literally! (Vijayan used to be a communist who got disillusioned by the ideology after the Soviets invaded Hungary)

If you Mallus want to redeem your honour, you can help me out by answering this question about Mallu literature that I have. This time, there is no trick, and I don’t know the answer to this one.
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CK, over at Yazad’s place, wants to know if we libertarians ever think that corporations are in the wrong in any single instance. Of course we do. But we do believe that in a society with just laws, criminals are in a minority, and when criminals commit crimes, they should be punished for it. Negligience by Union Carbide that resulted in 2000 of Bhopal’s citizens dying almost certainly falls into that category.

But because we believe that criminals are a minority, we don’t believe that a surveillence regime makes sense, whether against citizens or against corporations. In fact, we believe that a society that requires permissions for everything ends up benefiting criminals and hurting honest people. As the ardent capitalist Ram Manohar Lohia said, “Panditji, under your socialism, an honest man cannot become rich and a rich man cannot stay honest”
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And also for K R Aadisthan, to test his potential Malluness.

Connect Veerappan and a Mallu author.
This is a Quizzing type “connect” question.

The connect also involves the noble sport of Nehru bashing.

419ers take Aussie financial advisor for AU$1m | The Register

A Melbourne financial manager faces a hefty prison sentence after stealing AU$1m from his clients and handing it over to Nigerian advance fee fraudsters.
Robert Andrew Street, 58, fell for a classic 419 scam after receiving an email from the Reverend Sam Kukah offering him a cool $65m in return for relocating cash held by Nigeria’s Presidential Payment Debt Reconciliation Committee. Naturally, Street quickly learned that there were certain expenses he had to meet to oil the wheels of the illicit transfer. Accordingly, he set about fleecing clients of his financial planning business – Making Dollars & Sense – by getting them to invest in fictitious get-rich-quick schemes.

Wow. A financial manager.

Shourie gives Rs 12 crore to IIT-Kanpur!

Admirable gesture, but didn’t his dad file a PIL against the very concept of the MP Local Area Development Scheme?

An interesting article in The Economist (Link will stay free for a week) arguing that the best way to ensure a smooth and successful succession in a company is to groom an insider through a formal selection process rather than recruiting someone from outside or holding a competition among insiders (as the BJP is doing now by default).

Somewhat related Question: What is the difference between Heir Apparent and Heir Presumptive? No searching or looking at dictionaries please.

Google Desktop has been launched. When will http://conscience.google.com come out?

Thanks to a commentor known only as Corrector of Maladies, I was able to skim through the original report by Goldman Sachs on which Rajeev Srinivasan based his article, and it turns out that I was thoroughly wrong, and unfair in my criticism of the author. The report does indeed do what Rajeev says it does, and I made a really bad mistake. The mistake I made was:
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(I am taking this back. See here)
I was browsing through the Blog Mela posts and one of the entries over there is by Shyam Nair who is trying to bash up Nehru.

Now that is an entirely commendable activity and I can only wish that more and more young men take up the hobby, but you should keep up some standards. For example, you should not approvingly link to Rajeev Srinivasan’s article on what he calls the “Nehurvian Penalty” that is, I am afraid, an embarrassment to anyone who understands numbers, as I have explained.

Gaurav has been rather unusually lucky in encountering stupidity. As for me, if ever I changed professions to become a serial killer, I’d specialise in killing ICICI Bank employees.

Here is a sample conversation I had some years back.

Me: I’d like a DD drawn on Lucknow please. [I was paying off my educational loan]
She: We don’t have a branch in Lucknow. Would Hyderabad do?
Me: How would that help?
She: You’d save on charges. If we don’t have a branch in a place, we’d have to use correspondent banks and the charges for that will be higher…
Me: But I want a DD on Lucknow. How would getting one drawn on Hyderabad help?
She: They are close by right?

She had a narrow escape that day.