A tale of a toenail … and other related items

I have had a ingrown toe-nail removed. The growth in itself was not all that painful, though it hurt once in a while. But now that it is out, the bandage and related aftercare has resulted in a blister that hurts. While wondering about what ointment to put to relieve the blister, I thought of what I would have used, had I been in India right now – Burnol, of course. So, I googled it to see what it’s active ingredient is, so I could get a similar local balm – it appears that Burnol does not carry the influence in India that it once did. What had been brilliantly marketed as a burn salve was re-marketed as a general antiseptic, and that strategy failed to take-off.

 

While checking out other posts in the blog referred to above, my attention was drawn to a link about Gold Spot. I am (was?) a Fanta kid. When it suddenly out of the market along with the rest of the Coca Cola products, thanks to the Janata Party, I wondered where it went. Gold Spot took some getting used to, but get used to it I did after a while. Now, sadly, it has gone out of the market also and Fanta is back. But, Fanta is nothing like what it was before, at least in the Indian marketplace. What is ironic is that by kicking Coca Cola out of India back in the 1970s, Janata Party seems to have ensured that at least some of the Coca Cola products won’t carry the same reach they carried before (or maybe I am wrong, and I was part of the 49% – as opposed to the 51% – back then). But either way, it is sad that Gold Spot is gone for good. Hopefully, some entrepreneur can buy the franchise/brand back from Coca Cola and get it re-started.

Lessons learned

A couple of things I’ve learned in the USA …
1. The customer is always right, until proven wrong.
2. In an exam, you always start off with a 100/100, until you lose points for errors.

Whosaidit?

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage.

Stanley McChrystal? Nope! It was Mark Twain.

Via Prem Panicker

What is the going rate of vowels on the Wheel of Fortune?

Who’s Hu?

A friend forwarded me this link.

I can think of four characters from the Mahabharata that form a nice analogy (assuming a similar situation did take place back then). It is up to you to match them up (and no, Shakuni is NOT Uncle Sam)!

1. USA                                                a. Yudhishthira
2. China                                              b. Veda Vyasa*
3. India                                              c. Shakuni
4. Pakistan                                           d. Duryodhana

* – I toyed with the idea of using Bheeshma, Drona, Dhritarashtra, Krishna, Balarama etc. before settling on Vyasa.

Switching tracks – arbitrarily or at random* …

When watching videos on Youtube, it is nice when you are provided with a related list of songs to watch. Depending on the song you pick, you are provided with more choices. Each decision is linked to the previous decision.

For example, if you start off watching a song from the 1960s with, say, Sharmila Tagore, you will likely be shown more songs from the 1960s starring Sharmila Tagore to select from. There will likely be one or two outliers where either the song is from the 1970s or 1950s, or the actress is different. If, then, you pick a song with, say, Mumtaz, your subsequent choices will include more Mumtaz songs, and so on. You’ll get the feeling of being in a train, and the train has the potential to switch tracks based upon each of your selections. Talking of tracks …

Thanks to those years of listening to BBC News and Sports, and also cricket commentary over the radio, I can identify a handful of English accents, especially British English, Australian, several within the Indian subcontinent, and American. Since coming to the USA, I have added to my kitty the ability to identify a couple of European English accents (French, German), and a couple of African ones (South African and a mixed West African – i.e., I cannot tell apart the Ghanaian and Nigerian accents). All these are generic, in the sense that I cannot distinguish between the various accents within each of these nationalities.

While watching PBS a couple of weeks ago, I was totally thrown off track by the accent of a reporter for the Financial Times – just when I thought I was getting a handle on her accent, it switched, very much like a train that is not really continuously changing tracks, but is going and back and forth within the same set of two or three tracks. Noting her name, I googled her, and sure enough, she had the set/combination of complementary accents – part British, part French, part American – that, when “shaken, not stirred,” served to addle me pretty good!! Maybe there is a specific mix of accents that she speaks, but I am not that proficient at accent identification. Now that I am referring to accents …

I just watched The Interpreter. While Nicole Kidman does a good job of masking her (natural) Australian accent, her refactored accent was no African accent. She ought to have taken lessons from Charlize Theron; better yet, maybe they should have chosen Ms. Theron for the role.

* = there is a rhyme and reason to this specific choice of words. Back in school, I remember us students using arbitrary to signify random, and we were corrected by our English teacher thus: While the word random does imply random, in the sense that there is no reason one option would be picked over the other, arbitrary, on the other other hand, though similar, is not the same because it would likely be based on the whim of someone.

In other words, though to the observer, it would still appear to be a random selection, to the doer, there would be an underlying reason (his or her own, or even truly random) for making the selection. Of course, in this post, I do explain my arbitrariness in picking a potpourri of seemingly random topics!

A note to my idol-in-law

Andre Agassi, please shut the heck up. We do not need to know what all controlled and uncontrolled substances you took and got away with. Wait a minute! We do want to know all the “right” things you did to maintain that level of fitness, but if you are saying that it is impossible to do so without the banned substances, you might as well recall your book. Surely, you don’t need the money, do you?