Lessons from the bail-out
Was there ever greater proof than the last fortnight’s events for Kahn’s Law: ‘The rich get rich and the poor get poorer’. The world’s bankers who have brought us to this crisis walk away with millions, while ordinary taxpayers foot the bill. No-one should be surprised. As for saving your own skin, the best advice may be Swanson’s. ‘When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats.’
Palin’s Precepts
What, we wondered, are the Laws that feisty Alaskan senator Sarah Palin subscribes to? Some suggestions below:
First off, she’d undoubtedly agree with Whitton’s Law, and it’s corollary.
Secondly, her reputation for shaking up cosy, corrupt government suggests she’d have some sympathy with Stalin’s adage (in the case of the murderous Soviet regime, the obvious riposte was “but where’s the omelette?”), if not with his methods.
Finally, Palin’s track record as a doer puts in mind Lady Thatcher’s withering assessment of men in politics.
New laws posted today
“When taxi drivers know the name of a FTSE 100 boss, it’s a bad sign”, says Harvard Professor John Quelch in his article ‘How to spot a chief executive who is going off the rails’. Read the 10 signs of trouble here.
Meanwhile, also on the subject of organisational flaws, Rod Liddle points out the discrepancy between the politically correct public stance taken by large organisations like the BBC and the Metropolitan Police on racism, and the exclusively white faces that sit atop them. Read Rod’s law here.
Bill Gates’ advice to school-leavers
As thousands of 18 year olds get ready for their gap year (after a hard summer flitting between villas in Majorca, the Algarve and St Tropez) parents funding the whole shebang could do worse than print off Bill Gates’ advice for their return.
The founder of Microsoft provides a healthy dose of realism to those used only to pre-Crunch largesse. Rule 5 of 11 gives you something of the flavour. ‘Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity.’
The Art of Blind Reviewing
News that Robin Goldstein’s fake Italian Restaurant - Osteria L’Intrepido - won an ‘Award of Excellence’ from Wine Spectator magazine, despite being completely imaginary, has put a spring in the step of hoaxers everywhere. The magazine has, with astonishing chutzpah, described the hoax as “an act of malicious duplicity”, overlooking its own duplicity in recommending a restaurant to its readers which it had not properly evaluated. Click here for more on Goldstein’s hoax, and for his book, here.
In The Times, Ben Macintrye draws parallels between the magazine’s restaurant reviewing practices and book reviewing, where it has, apparently, never been seen as a requirement that reviewers actually read the book.
Prescott’s class act
The words ‘Prescott’ and ‘grapples’ conjure up the most unsavoury of images, involving the former deputy PM and his diary secretary Tracey Temple, so it is a relief - almost - to learn that in his new BBC2 programme the only thing he is grappling with is “political apathy, middle-class syntax, snobbery and the wealth gap in modern Britain”. There is, of course, only one thing to be said about class, and Eleanor Roosevelt said it best. Money, on the other hand, is a more complex subject, with many laws.
Go China!
As the Chinese and American basketball teams clashed last night in an epic encounter watched by the presidents of both countries (score: 101:70 to the visiting team), it is doubtful whether Raymond Chandler’s Law comes as much consolation to the host nation. More reflective of their feelings are the words of Vince Lombard : “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” or even, to borrow from Mao, “Sport is the continuation of war by other means”. How quaint, and appealing, then to consider Grantland Rice’s old-fashioned views on the manner of sporting competition.
Strategy for Saakashvili
Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, one of the most influential military thinkers of the twentieth century, distilled the essence of strategy and tactics into eight maxims in his classic work Strategy. His ideas strongly influenced German tactics in WW2, Field Marshal Rommel declaring that “The British would have been able to prevent the greatest part of their defeats if they had paid attention to the modern theories expounded by Liddell Hart before the war.”
Beleagured Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili looks like he has already breached the first of the 8 maxims. Survival of the Russian onslaught may now depend more in diplomacy than warfare. With that in mind, he and George Bush could do worse than study Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and, in particular, The Trollope Ploy.
The Laws of Golf
The official rules of golf, as laid down by the R&A in 1897 and updated since, run to dozens of clauses and subclauses, but serious practitioners of the game know that it is run by a completely different set of rules:
• You can always find a golf ball when you are not looking for it by being where you wouldn’t be if you were looking for it.
• The best way to go round a tree standing directly in your path is to am directly at it.
• A bad shot always travels far enough to land in more trouble.
• No matter how badly you play, there will always be at least one shot per round so perfect, so on target, and so gratifying that you will come back to play again.
• The player with the fastest golf buggie never has a bad lie.
• Nobody cares what you shot today - except you.
Hitting the trail
Backpacking this summer? Mit Barber has some observations:
1. The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail you choose to hike always comes out positive.
2. Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure.
3. The weight of your rucksack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the rucksack weight goes on increasing anyway.
4. The number of stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail.
5. The difficulty of finding any given trail marker is directly proportional to the importance of the consequences of failing to find it.
6. The size of each of the stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail.
7. The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as twilight approaches.
8. The net weight of your boots is proportional to the cube of the number of hours you have been on the trail.
9. When you arrive at your campsite, it is full.
10. If you take your boots off, you’ll never get them back on again.
11. The local density of mosquitoes is inversely proportional to the amount of your remaining insect repellent.
