McKenzie

Give credit where credit is due, goes the expression, but in this week's words the credit is misplaced. Each of these words is coined after the wrong person.
It's not always easy to assign credit, however, as the contention on the naming of diseases shows.
There's even a law about misplaced credits. Stigler's law of eponymy says, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." Stigler credits this law to sociologist Robert K. Merton (thus making the law self-referential).
Check out this week's five words not named after the person they should be.

McKenzie

PRONUNCIATION:

(muh-KEN-zee)

MEANING:

noun: Someone who attends a court trial as an adviser to one of the parties. This person works not as a legal representative, but as an informal adviser. Also known as a "McKenzie friend".

ETYMOLOGY:

The term arose from the 1970 divorce case McKenzie v. McKenzie in the UK. The man in this case didn't have a lawyer. An Australian barrister, Ian Hanger, wanted to help, but could not as he was not qualified to practise in the UK. The man represented himself; Hanger offered to sit with him and provide advice as a friend, but he was denied this by the court. The man lost the case, and this denial became the basis for appeal which affirmed the position that a litigant can, in fact, have someone attend the trial to help in a non-professional capacity. Given the role of the barrister Hanger, a better choice of coinage for this word would have been Hanger, instead of McKenzie.

USAGE:

"A measure, of benefit to women especially, would be to permit the litigant to have a McKenzie friend in the course of the case."
Chitra Narayan; On An Obstacle Course; Hindu (Chennai, India); Nov 17, 2005.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. -Hal Borland, journalist (1900-1978)

quotes

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
           -- Groucho Marx
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong-- or absolutely right.
           -- Albert Guinon

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
           -- Flannery O'Connor
 
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
           -- W. C. Fields


If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
           -- Abraham Lincoln

The secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
           -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

A husband is like a fire, he goes out when unattended.
           -- Evan Esar


I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.
           -- Elayne Boosler

Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
           -- Henry David Thoreau
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
           -- Edith Sitwell
I've never been married, but I tell people I'm divorced so they won't think something's wrong with me.
Elayne BooslerI'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
           -- Carl Sandburg, Incidentals (1907)

I'm still an atheist, thank God.
           -- Luis Bunuel

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
           -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are strange.
           -- Robin Morgan

Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how little you have.
           -- Ernest Haskin

Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it's worse when they are wearing dark glasses and have streamers in their antlers because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.
           -- Ellen DeGeneres
Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.
           -- David Letterman

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
           -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
           -- Sam Brown, Washington Post, 1977

bagman

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

bagman

PRONUNCIATION:

(BAG-man, BAG-muhn)

MEANING:

noun:
1. One who collects or distributes money from illicit activities, for example, in a protection racket.
2. UK: A traveling salesman.
3. Canada: A political fundraiser.
4. Australia: A tramp; swagman.
5. Golf: A caddie hired to carry a golf player's clubs.

ETYMOLOGY:

From the literal senses of the words bag and man.

USAGE:

"Andres Butron confessed to being a bagman in a drug operation, transporting cash collected in drug sales to Mexico."
William Lee; 3 Men Found Dead; Chicago Tribune; May 19, 2010.

"Here is an account of how the hawker, the street peddler, the lowly bagman, evolved into the mighty selling and marketing gurus of today."
Birth of a Salesman; Financial Times (London, UK); May 22, 2004.

"The party also has turned a fundraising corner with its new and energetic bagman Rocco Rossi."
Barbara Yaffe; Struggling Ignatieff Needs Peter Donolo; The Ottawa Citizen (Canada); Nov 2, 2009.

"Anyone who wants to know just how the lot of the caddie has changed need only look at Steve Williams, Tiger Woods's bagman. He is frequently referred to as the highest-paid sportsman in New Zealand."
Nomadic Life Became Byrne's Bag; Irish Times (Dublin); Nov 21, 2009.

Explore "bagman" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. -John Muir, Naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

quotes

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
           -- Arthur Honegger

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.
           -- Tom Lehrer

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
           -- Claud Cockburn

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
           -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
           -- Wilson Mizner

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
           -- Franz Kafka

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
           -- Bertrand Russell
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
           -- John Kenneth Galbraith

All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often.
           -- Stanislaw J. Lec, "Unkempt Thoughts"

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
           -- Thomas Hardy
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
           -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I improve on misquotation.
           -- Cary Grant

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
           -- Bill Watterson, cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes"

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
           -- George Bernard Shaw
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
           -- Ronald Reagan

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.
           -- Emile Chartier

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
           -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Foreword

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
           -- Jules Renard
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
           -- Mark Twain, Notebooks (1935)

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
           -- Bill Hoest

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
           -- Josh Billings

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.
           -- Elbert Hubbard

St. Elmo's fire

St. Elmo's fire

PRONUNCIATION:

(saynt EL-mohz fyr)

MEANING:

noun: An electrical discharge visible at the surface of a conductor, as a ship's mast or an airplane's wing.

ETYMOLOGY:

After St. Erasmus (mispronounced as Elmo by sailors) who is regarded as the patron saint of sailors and an electrical discharge on the mast of a ship is believed to be a sign of his protection. This phenomenon of corona discharge is also called St. Elmo's light.

USAGE:

"When Capt Moody opened the door to the cockpit he saw the windscreen ablaze with a St. Elmo's fire -- a discharge of static electricity."
When Volcanic Ash Stopped a Jumbo at 37,000ft; BBC News (London, UK); Apr 15, 2010.

"Donald Holder's lighting design needed more pizzazz, particularly in scenes like the storm that sparks St. Elmo's fire on the ship's masts."
Heidi Waleson; Taming the Whale; The Wall Street Journal (New York); May 4, 2010.

rotation of crops

In today's excerpt - the Dutch invent crop rotation in the late 1500s. For thousands
of years, all societies had been subsistence societies, barely able to feed their
inhabitants since low agricultural productivity meant a permanent scarcity of labor
and land. This left precious few resources available for invention and innovation,
but then came the breakthrough - because of their extreme scarcity of land, the
Dutch were driven to find a better way to use land, freeing resources and setting
the stage for the Industrial Revolution:
"Agriculture throughout the world was woefully unproductive because cropping drained
the land of its fertility. The traditional remedy for soil exhaustion was allowing
land to become fallow to recapture its fertility, but this took a third or a quarter
of acres under tillage out of production. Farmers could also restore fertility by
adding nitrogen to the soil. Their principal source of this came from animals that
unfortunately had to be to stay alive and defecate, taking even more land away from
producing food for the people. Breaking through this bind of declining soil fertility
took a bundle of mutually enhancing practices. Fortunately Dutch farmers had been
experimenting with possible improvements for many decades.
"Some farmers in the Netherlands realized that they could abandon the old medieval
practice of leaving a third of the land to lie fallow each year. This move increased
the number of tilled acres by a third. Instead of the fallow rotation, they divided
land into four parts, rotating fields of grain, turnips, hay, and clover each season.
Not only did this increase the number of tilled acres by a third, but the clover
fed livestock after it had enriched the soil with its nitrogen deposits. The virtuous
circle of growth replaced the vicious circle of decline. When some landlords and
farmers responded to the possibility of becoming more productive, they were taking
the first permanent steps away from the age-old economy of scarcity.
"English farmers copied the Dutch and succeeded in making their agricultural base
feed more and more people with fewer laborers and less investment. Unlike the Dutch,
the English had enough arable land to grow the grains that fed the people as well
as their livestock. The Dutch could not produce what was needed to get their people
through a year. With their profits from trade, they could store grain, but this
lifesaving program got more and more expensive.
"While some English farmers copied the Dutch four-field rotation, others adopted
up-and-down husbandry. In this routine, a farmer would crop his best land for three
or four years and then put it in pasture for another five, during which time the
animal manure and nitrogen-fixing crops would rebuild the fertility necessary for
growing grains again. As in the Dutch system, land was no longer left fallow but
always growing some crop, whether for animals or humans. Every element on the farm
was put to some use; every hand, given new tasks. These innovations made urgent
a farmer's attentiveness because of their interlocking qualities. Both the Dutch
and English began to flood meadows to warm the soil in winter and extend the growing
season. Over the course of the century all these improvements raised the seed to
yield ratio, the labor to yield ratio, and the land to yield ratio. Or more simply,
they led to bigger harvests from fewer acres, less labor, and fewer seeds."
Author: Joyce Appleby
Title: The Relentless Revolution
Publisher: Norton
Date: Copyright 2010 by Joyce Appleby
Pages: 73-74

Achilles' heel

Achilles' heel

PRONUNCIATION:

(uh-KIL-eez heel)

MEANING:

noun: A seemingly small but critical weakness in an otherwise strong position.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Achilles, a hero in the Greek mythology. When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him into the magical river Styx to make him immortal. She held him by the heel which remained untouched by the water and became his weak point. He was killed when the Trojan king Paris shot an arrow that pierced his one vulnerable spot: his heel. After him, the tendon in the lower back of the ankle is also known as the Achilles tendon.

USAGE:

"Economics, once the Coalition's strength, is in danger of becoming its achilles heel."
Laurie Oakes; Coalition Weak on Economics; Herald Sun (Melbourne City, Australia); Apr 3, 2010.

Explore "Achilles' heel" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Though I have been trained as a soldier, and participated in many battles, there never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword. I look forward to an epoch when a court, recognized by all nations, will settle international differences. -Ulysses S. Grant, military commander, 18th US President (182

Do Medications Really expire?? Worth a read

DO MEDICATIONS REALLY EXPIRE?
By Richard Altschuler

Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like "Do not use after June 1998," and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you no good?

In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have "expired" are still perfectly good?

These are the pressing questions I investigated after my mother-in-law recently said to me, "It doesn't mean anything," when I pointed out that the Tylenol she was about to take had "expired" 4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit mocking in my pronouncement -- feeling superior that I had noticed the chemical corpse in her cabinet -- but she was equally adamant in her reply, and is generally very sage about medical issues.

So I gave her a glass of water with the purportedly "dead" drug, of which she took 2 capsules for a pain in the upper back. About a half hour later she reported the pain seemed to have eased up a bit. I said "You could be having a placebo effect," not wanting to simply concede she was right about the drug, and also not actually knowing what I was talking about. I was just happy to hear that her pain had eased, even before we had our evening cocktails and hot tub dip (we were in "Leisure World," near Laguna Beach , California , where the hot tub is bigger than most Manhattan apartments, and "Heaven," as generally portrayed, would be raucous by comparison).
Upon my return to NYC and high-speed connection, I immediately scoured the medical databases and general literature for the answer to my question about drug expiration labeling. And voila, no sooner than I could say "Screwed again by the pharmaceutical industry," I had my answer. Here are the simple facts:
First, the expiration date, required by law in the United States , beginning in 1979, specifies only the date the manufacturer guarantees the full potency and safety of the drug -- it does not mean how long the drug is actually "good" or safe to use.
Second, medical authorities uniformly say it is safe to take drugs past their expiration date -- no matter how "expired" the drugs purportedly are. Except for possibly the rarest of exceptions, you won't get hurt and you certainly won't get killed.
A contested example of a rare exception is a case of renal tubular damage purportedly caused by expired tetracycline (reported by G. W. Frimpter and colleagues in JAMA, 1963;184:111) . This outcome (disputed by other scientists) was supposedly caused by a chemical transformation of the active ingredient.

Third, studies show that expired drugs may lose some of their potency over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50% or more (though usually much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the "expiration date," most drugs have a good deal of their original potency. So wisdom dictates that if your life does depend on an expired drug, and you must have 100% or so of its original strength, you should probably toss it and get a refill, in accordance with the cliché, "better safe than sorry." If your life does not depend on an expired drug -- such as that for headache, hay fever, or menstrual cramps -- take it and see what happens.
One of the largest studies ever conducted that supports the above points about "expired drug" labeling was done by the US military 15 years ago, according to a feature story in the Wall Street Journal (March 29, 2000), reported by Laurie P. Cohen. The military was sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every 2 to 3 years, so it began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory. The testing, conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results showed that about 90% of them were safe and effective as far as 15 years past their original expiration date.

In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, said he concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. Mr. Flaherty noted that a drug maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on whatever expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn't mean, or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that it will become harmful. "Manufacturers put expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons," said Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement in 1999. "It's not profitable for them to have products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover."
The FDA cautioned there isn't enough evidence from the program, which is weighted toward drugs used during combat, to conclude most drugs in consumers' medicine cabinets are potent beyond the expiration date. Joel Davis, however, a former FDA expiration-date compliance chief, said that with a handful of exceptions -- notably nitroglycerin, insulin, and some liquid antibiotics -- most drugs are probably as durable as those the agency has tested for the military. "Most drugs degrade very slowly," he said. "In all likelihood, you can take a product you have at home and keep it for many years, especially if it's in the refrigerator."

Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts 2-year or 3-year dates on aspirin and says that it should be discarded after that. However, Chris Allen, a vice president at the Bayer unit that makes aspirin, said the dating is "pretty conservative"; when Bayer has tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100% effective, he said. So why doesn't Bayer set a 4-year expiration date? Because the company often changes packaging, and it undertakes "continuous improvement programs," Mr. Allen said. Each change triggers a need for more expiration-date testing, and testing each time for a 4-year life would be impractical. Bayer has never tested aspirin beyond 4 years, Mr. Allen said. But Jens Carstensen has. Dr. Carstensen, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin 's pharmacy school, who wrote what is considered the main text on drug stability, said, "I did a study of different aspirins, and after 5 years, Bayer was still excellent. Aspirin, if made correctly, is very stable.
Okay, I concede. My mother-in-law was right, once again. And I was wrong, once again, and with a wiseacre attitude to boot. Sorry mom.
Now I think I'll take a swig of the 10-year dead package of Alka Seltzer in my medicine chest -- to ease the nausea I'm feeling from calculating how many billions of dollars the pharmaceutical industry bilks out of unknowing consumers every year who discard perfectly good drugs and buy new ones because they trust the industry's "expiration date labeli

The Toilet

In today's excerpt - the toilet. Thomas Crapper became very wealthy by inventing
the Marlboro Silent Water Waste Preventer:


"Perhaps no word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than
'toilet'. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of
"toile", a word still used to describe a type of linen.


"Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on
the dressing table (whence 'toiletries'). Then it became the dressing table itself,
then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then
the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room
used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why 'toilet water'
in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously,
'water in a toilet.' ...


"Most sewagestillwent into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected and the contents
often seeped into neighbouring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed.
The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever
been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described.
They worked in teams of three or four. One man - the most junior, we may assume
- was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by
the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets
to a waiting cart. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since
they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments.


"In St Giles, the worst of London"s rookeries - scene of Hogarth's Gin Lane - 54,000
people were crowded into just a few streets. Such masses of humanity naturally produced
enormous volumes of waste - far more than any system of cesspits could cope with.
In one report, an inspector recorded visiting two houses in St Giles where the cellars
were filled with human waste to a depth of three feet. The river was a perpetual
'flood of liquid manure,' as one observer put it. The streams that fed into the
Thames were often even worse than the Thames itself. The river Fleet was in 1831
'almost motionless with solidifying filth.'


"Into this morass came something that proved, unexpectedly, to be a disaster: the
flush toilet.Flush toilets of a type had been around for some time. The very first
was built by John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth I. When Harington demonstrated
his invention to her in 1597, she expressed great delight and had it immediately
installed in Richmond Palace. But it was a novelty well ahead of its time and almost
200 years passed before Joseph Bramah, a cabinet maker and locksmith, patented the
first modern flush toilet in 1778. It caught on in a modest way. Many others followed.
But early toilets often didn't work well. Sometimes they backfired, filling the
room with even more of what the horrified owner had very much hoped to be rid of.
Until the development of the U-bend and water trap - that little reservoir of water
that returns to the bottom of the bowl after each flush - every toilet bowl acted
as a conduit to the smells of cesspit and sewer. The backwaft of odors, particularly
in hot weather, could be unbearable.


"This problem was resolved by one of the great and surely most extraordinarily appropriate
names in history, that of Thomas Crapper (1837-1910), who was born into a poor family
in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of 11. There he became an
apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and still familiar
toilet with an elevated cistern activated by the pull of a chain. Called the Marlboro
Silent Water Waste Preventer, it was clean, leak-proof, odor-free and wonderfully
reliable, and their manufacture made Crapper very rich and so famous that it is
often assumed that he gave his name to the slang term "crap" and its many derivatives.


"In fact, 'crap' in the lavatorial sense is very ancient and 'crapper' for a toilet
is an Americanism not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 1922. Crapper's
name, it seems, was just a happy accident."


Author: Bill Bryson
Title: "The history of the toilet," (from the upcoming book At Home: A Short History
of Private Life, Doubleday)
Publisher: guardian.co.uk
Date: May 17, 2010

quotes

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
           -- Carl Sagan

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
           -- Eric Hoffer

No man ever listened himself out of a job.
           -- Calvin Coolidge

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
           -- George Orwell

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.
           -- Henry Kissinger

Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?
           -- Dick Clark

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
           -- Tom Stoppard

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
           -- Jane Austen
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
           -- James M. Barrie
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
           -- Larry Hardiman




What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
           -- Unknown

A witty saying proves nothing.
           -- Voltaire

Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
           -- Artemus Ward

It takes too much energy to be against something unless it's really important.
           -- Madeleine L'Engle
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
           -- Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
           -- Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003

Software Engineers..

An ambitious software engineer finally decided to take a vacation. He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life.
At least for a while.

A hurricane came up unexpectedly. The ship went down and was lost instantly. The man found himself swept up on the shores of an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing. Only bananas and coconuts.

Used to five-star hotels, this guy had no idea what to do. So, for the next four months he ate bananas, drank coconut juice, longed for his old life, and fixed his gaze on the sea, hoping to spot a rescue ship.

One day, as he was lying on the beach, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. It was a rowboat, and in it was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen. She rowed up to him.

In disbelief, he asked her: "Where did you come from, and how did you get here?"

"I rowed from the other side of the island ," she said. "I landed here when my cruise ship sank."

"Amazing," the software engineer said, "I didn't know anyone else had survived. How many of you are there? You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you."

"It's only me," she said, "and the rowboat didn't wash up: nothing did."

He was confused, "Then how did you get the rowboat?"

"Oh, simple," replied the woman. "I made it out of raw material that I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum-tree branches, I wove the bottom from palm branches , and the sides and stern came from a eucalyptus tree."
"But, but, that's impossible," stuttered the man. "You had no tools or hardware - how did you manage?"

"Oh, that was no problem," the woman said. "On the south side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of exposed alluvial rock. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that to make tools, and used the tools to make the hardware. But enough of that. Where do you live?"

Sheepishly, the man confessed that he had been sleeping on the beach the whole time.

"Well, let's row over to my place then," she said.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docked the boat at a small wharf. As the man looked onto shore, he nearly fell out of the boat. Before him was a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.

While the woman tied up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man could only stare ahead, dumbstruck.

As they walked into the house, she said casually, "It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down, please. Would you like to have a drink?" "No, no, thank you," he said, still dazed. "I couldn't drink another drop of coconut juice." "It's not coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have made a still - How about a Pinacolada ?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the software engineer accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged their stories, the woman announced, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to have a shower and a shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom."

No longer questioning anything, the man went into the bathroom. There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow-ground edge were fastened to its tip, inside a swivel mechanism. "This woman is absolutely amazing," he mused. "What next?"

When he returned, the woman greeted him. She beckoned for him to sit down next to her. "Tell me," she began suggestively, slithering closer to him, brushing her leg against his, "We've both been out here for a very long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing to do for all of these months."

She stared into his eyes. He couldn't believe what he was hearing - this was like all of his dreams coming true in one day.

.
..

..
.
...

....
.

....

.....

....

.....

......


"You mean...," he replied, "I can check my e-mail from here?"

 

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS AND INTELLIGENT ANSWERS!

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS AND INTELLIGENT ANSWERS!


Questions and the Answers given by Candidates -

Q. How can you drop a raw egg onto a concrete floor without cracking it?

A.Concrete floors are very hard to crack! (UPSC Topper)


Q. If it took eight men ten hours to build a wall, how long would it take
four men to build it?

A. No time at all it is already built. (UPSC 23 Rank Opted for IFS)


Q.. If you had three apples and four oranges in one hand and four apples
and
three oranges in the other hand, what would you have?

A. Very large hands.(UPSC 11 Rank Opted for IPS)

Q. How can you lift an elephant with one hand?

A. It is not a problem, since you will never find an elephant with one
hand. (UPSC Rank 14 Opted for IES)


Q. How can a man go eight days without sleep?

A. No Problem, He sleeps at night. (UPSC IAS Rank 98)


Q. If you throw a red stone into the blue sea what it will become?

A. It will get Wet or Sink; as simple as that. (UPSC IAS Rank 2)


Q. What looks like a half apple?
A: The other half. (UPSC - IAS Topper)


Q. What can you never eat for breakfast?

A: Dinner...


Q. What happened when wheel was invented?

A : It caused a revolution.


Q. Bay of Bengal is in which state?

A : Liquid (Good one)  (UPSC 33Rank )


Q. How many buckets of water does Pacific Ocean contains?

A: It depends on the size of the bucket. (CA Institute Campus Interview
Placement)


Interviewer said 'I shall either ask you ten easy questions or one really
difficult question.. Think well before you make up your mind!'
The boy thought for a while and said, 'My choice is one really difficult
question.'

'Well, good luck to you, you have made your own choice! Now tell me
this...'What comes first, Day or Night?'

The boy was jolted into reality as his admission depended on his answer,
but he thought for a while and said, 'It's the DAY sir!'

'How?' the interviewer asked.

'Sorry sir, you promised me that you will not ask me a SECOND difficult
question!'

He was selected for IIM!

The Genius in All of Us

In today's excerpt - genius. The popular conception of genius is that it is an inborn
gift, yet an increasingly large body of research suggests the opposite - that genius
is always the product of sustained effort. A case in point - Mozart:
"Standing above all other giftedness legends, of course, [is] that of the
mystifying boy genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, alleged to be an instant
master performer at age three and a brilliant composer at age five. His breath-taking
musical gifts were said to have sprouted from nowhere, and his own
father promoted him as the 'miracle which God let be born in Salzburg.'
"The reality about Mozart turns out to be far more interesting and far less
mysterious. His early achievements - while very impressive, to be sure -
actually make good sense considering his extraordinary upbringing. And his
later undeniable genius turns out to be a wonderful advertisement for the
power of process. Mozart was bathed in music from well before his birth, and his
childhood was quite unlike any other. His father, Leopold Mozart, was an intensely
ambitious Austrian musician, composer, and teacher who had gained
wide acclaim with the publication of the instruction book A Treatise on the Fundamental
Principles of Violin Playing. For a while, Leopold had dreamed of being a great
composer himself. But on becoming a father, he began to shift his ambitions away
from his own unsatisfying career and onto his children - perhaps, in part, because
his career had already hit a ceiling: he was vice-kapellmeister (assistant music
director); the top spot would be unavailable for the foreseeable future.
"Uniquely situated, and desperate to make some sort of lasting mark on music, Leopold
began his family musical enterprise even before Wolfgang's birth, focusing first
on his daughter Nannerl. Leopold's elaborate teaching method derived in part from
the Italian instructor Giuseppe Tartini and included highly nuanced techniques ...
"Then came Wolfgang. Four and a half years younger than his sister, the tiny boy
got everything Nannerl got - only much earlier and even more intensively. Literally
from his infancy, he was the classic younger sibling soaking up his big sister's
singular passion. As soon as he was able, he sat beside her at the harpsichord
and mimicked notes that she played. Wolfgang's first pings and plucks were just
that. But with a fast-developing ear, deep curiosity and a tidal wave of family
know-how, he was able to click into an accelerated process of development.
"As Wolfgang became fascinated with playing music, his father became fascinated
with his toddler son's fascination - and was soon instructing him
with an intensity that far eclipsed his efforts with Nannerl. Not only did Leopold
openly give preferred attention to Wolfgang over his daughter; he also made a career-altering
decision to more or less shrug off his official duties in order to build an even
more promising career for his son. This was not a quixotic adventure. Leopold's
calculated decision made reasonable financial sense, ... Wolfgang's youth made
him a potentially lucrative attraction. ...
From the age of three, then, Wolfgang had an entire family driving him to excel
with a powerful blend of instruction, encouragement, and constant
practice. He was expected to be the pride and financial engine of the family,
and he did not disappoint. In his performances from London to Mannheim
between the ages of six and eight, he drew good receipts and high praise from
noble patrons. ...
"Still, like his sister, the young Mozart was never a truly great adult-level
instrumentalist. He was highly advanced for his age, but not compared with
skillful adult performers. The tiny Mozart dazzled royalty and was at the time
unusual for his early abilities. But today many young children exposed to
Suzuki and other rigorous musical programs play as well as the young Mozart
did - and some play even better. Inside the world of these intensive, child-centered
programs, such achievements are now straightforwardly regarded by
parents and teachers for what they are: the combined consequence of early
exposure, exceptional instruction, constant practice, family nurturance, and a child's
intense will to learn. Like a brilliant souffle, all of these ingredients must be
present in just the right quantity and mixed with just the right timing and flair.
Almost anything can go wrong. The process is far from predictable and never in anyone's
complete control."
Author: David Shenk
Title: The Genius in All of Us
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by David Shenk
Pages: 50-52