Good and bad

Nice one from Scott Adams' blog http://dilbertblog.typepad.com

(Adams is the creator of Dilbert).

Question: What's your opinion of yourself?

Adams' answer: I’m good at some things and bad at others. I’m lucky that there’s a market for the things I’m good at.

One of my favourite questions

This has been one of my favourite quiz questions ever since I came across it about 10 years back:

In which sport would you come across all the following field positions: point, coverpoint, thirdman and goalkeeper?

Saving journalism from journalists!

Top para from David Randall's 'The Universal Journalist':

"In many British papers, annoyance (meaning you are not pleased) is invariably now 'fury' (suggesting anger beyond control), an arrangement (meaning an informal agreement) is a 'deal' (meaning a far more formal agreement, with definite overtones of a financial, possibly even shady, side), bad luck is a 'curse', to criticise is 'to slam', failure to attend is a 'snub', internal dispute is 'civil war', possibility is 'threat', a proposal is a 'plan', to replace is to 'oust', a traffic jam is 'road chaos', etc. All of these examples (and there are many more to choose from) are shorter, more extreme and more brutal than the reality they describe."

And now the punch line: "It is as if the story is being translated into another language by an angry man with a limited vocabulary."

Indian papers are getting there or aren't they already there?

Punch lines and leads

"When you look at all jokes and humour across socieites, the common denominator of all jokes and humour despite all the diversity is that you take a person along a garden path of expectation and at the very end you suddenly introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete re-interpretation of all the previous facts. That's called a punch-line of the joke."

Lines from one of the five 2003 Reith lectures delivered by Vilayanur Ramachandran, who I read somewhere is described as the Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience!

Apart from the punch line, he says, what is vital is that the re-interpretation should be of trivial significance.

His argument is that "Laughter is nature's false alarm."

Example: "Here is a portly gentleman walking along, he is trying to reach his destination, but before he does that he slips on a banana peel and falls. And then he breaks his head and blood spills out and obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call the ambulance. But imagine instead of that, he walks along, slips on the banana peel, falls, wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him everywhere, and and then gets up, then you start laughing. The reason is I claim is because now you know it's inconsequential, you say, oh it's no big deal, there's no real danger here."

Let me digress from neuroscience but will extend the punch-line theme a bit.

The following is the best example that I can think of of a nifty lead (punch line attached) for what you may call a fairly serious story. Given below is an intro of an Economist article on robots in Japan that I read a few months back:

"HER name is MARIE, and her impressive set of skills comes in handy in a nursing home. MARIE can walk around under her own power. She can distinguish among similar-looking objects, such as different bottles of medicine, and has a delicate enough touch to work with frail patients. MARIE can interpret a range of facial expressions and gestures, and respond in ways that suggest compassion. Although her language skills are not ideal, she can recognise speech and respond clearly. Above all, she is inexpensive. Unfortunately for MARIE, however, she has one glaring trait that makes it hard for Japanese patients to accept her: she is a flesh-and-blood human being from the Philippines. If only she were a robot instead."

Didn't that make you smile?

Difficulty in negotiating!

I yearn for a simpler world when I read such things: "When the maker or holder of a negotiable instrument signs the same, otherwise than as such maker, for the purpose of negotiation, on the back or face thereof or on a slip of paper annexed thereto, or so signs for the same purpose a stamped paper intended to be completed as a negotiable instrument, he is said to have endorsed the same and is called the endorser."

This is Section 15 of the Negotiable Instruments Act defining 'endorsement'.

Try this one!

Let me expand the P. G. Wodehouse theme a bit further with this question: Which character of his is based "more or less faithfully" on Rupert D'Oyly Carte, the son of the Savoy Theatre man?

One more to the 27.2 million

I had always known in a vague sort of way that many blogs have poor readership. But till yesterday I had no clue as to how many constitutes "many" and how "poor" is their readership.

It seems 26.9 million of the 27.2 million blogs in existence don't have any readers. I came across this not-encouraging statistic just before registering mine yesterday.

I am determined to make my blog part of the elite list of blogs that has readers. As a major step, I intend to ask my closest relatives and friends to take a look at it.

Having made up my mind, the first major question was: what to name it? My broad plan was to find an appropriate synonym for words like 'thought' or 'views' or something to that effect.

A quick thesaurus check made me realise that my senior bloggers have already employed some of the better words (Why should I have assumed that 27.2 million bloggers wouldn't have checked free resources on the Net!).

Some of the other impressive options like Instant Kaapi, Idli Sambar and Coffee House (my friend Ramanth's blog) have already been used up.

Irritated at not finding an appropriate word at a vital time (surely not the first time in my life), I looked around my room - a sign that all's not well.

Thankfully, my eye spotted P. G. Wodehouse's novel 'Something Fresh'. There were no second thoughts; this was the title.

Having put that as the blog title, I would like to assure 'readers' that my posts more often than not wouldn't adhere to what the title stands for.

For me, 'Something Fresh' sounds good. Nothing more than that.

But to justify the title at least in this blog, I will quote a part of Wodehouse's preface for the novel. Typically Wodehousian, if there's such a usage, the passage tells us why George Horace Lorimer, the editor of Saturday Evening Post, agreed to publish 'Something Fresh.'

"I have always had the idea that Lorimer must have been put in a receptive mood the moment he saw the title page. My pulp magazine stories had been by 'P. G. Wodehouse', but 'Something Fresh' was the work of: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, and I am convinced that that was what put it over.

A writer in America at that time who went about without three names was practically going around naked. Those were the days of Richard Harding Davis, of James Warner Bellah, of MargaretCulkin Banning ... Naturally, a level-headed editor like Lorimer was not going to let a Pelham Grenville Wodehouse get away from him.

If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the names Pelham Grenville, I must confess that I do not. I have my dark moods when they seem to me about as low as you can get. At the font I remember protesting vigorously when the clergyman uttered them, but he stuck to his point. 'Be that as it may,' he said firmly, having waited for a lull. 'I name thee Pelham Grenville.'

Apparently I was called after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it except a small silver mug which I lost in 1897. I little knew how the frightful label was going to pay off thirty-four years later."

What a writer!