Kingsley Lost!

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.

The great Blog Mela announcement

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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I learnt something about google today

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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More on working, gymming and sleeping

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?

“Do you need change?”

I had a slightly more tricky problem than Gaurav. The pizza guys in the US ask “Do you need change?” The bill was 11 dollars and I had paid 15. Four dollars looks like too much for a tip even by American standards. I am guessing that I was actually supposed to tell him what he can keep. But I couldn’t be sure, so I said “No”. What should I have done?

Things that are difficult to google

“What do they know of X who only X know?”

Do any of you people know what the “original” X was? This was one of those nagging questions that remained unresolved in the momentous meeting of bloggers that took place ten days back. Amit Varma mentioned the quote substituting “cricket” for X and he and Yazad were rather surprised to learn that the original value of X was not cricket. I don’t know what X was originally either, but I’ve heard it in enough contexts to know that cricket isn’t it. The problem is, the statement is true for all values of X. After all, to understand any subject you need the ability to place the subject in context, i.e. you need to go out of the box to understand the box.

As a result of its universal applicability, the statement has been liberally used for different values of X, making it ungoogleable. (For example you can find What do they know of England who only England know?) Can anyone help me find the original X? Please give citations.

Update: It looks like the original quote is “What do they know of England, who only England know?” and the author is Kipling.

The answer to “How would you do it?”

I am happy to have waited for more than a week before answering the question, because it gave me a lot of interesting responses.

Everyone seemed to know the capitalist “solution” to the problem, which is to simply sell the available food to the highest bidder. The reason why this is good is not that the right people will get the food – I will not presume that people who can pay are in any way better than those who can’t. The reason the solution is good is that the right people get the money. The high prices will give people an incentive to produce more food next year. Because that is the only way you can salvage any good out of the bad situation. Given what I have outlined, people are going to die this year regardless of what you do. But if you follow the right policies, you can prevent the situation from recurring next year. What I have just outlined is the solution to that problem under capitalism. To find whether it is the best solution or not, we need to compare it against the alternatives.

(See? People, it is possible to discuss complicated problems without using complicated phrases like “allocative efficiency” or indeed ontological)
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