Share Power & Happy Diwali!!

Some things are like a bad penny. They return back again and again and again.

Our Pool is one such thing.

In an X-files moment (a.k.a. early morning at 9), got this gem (self appreciation, ya ya).

Why not cajole the poor winners of the pool to part with a part of their winnings for charity?

By the time one brushed the dentures (self deprecation, ya ya), the idea was firm and next thing you know the winners got an email in the form of a guy holding a hat out :-)

Lo and behold, they came back thick and fast!

So what we have is...

The following good souls decided that they will donate their, part or full winnings for a charity:

Amar
Anand Re (Full)
Biju
Madhavan
Reddy
Sharath
Suryanshu & Ishan Combine (Full)
Yadavalli (Full)

That totalled up to $80.38 being rounded up by Zbank to $100.

This figure shall be donated to Red Cross as a few of the winners had indicated.

I shall do the honour next week and publish the receipt on these pages.

I was really touched to see the quick and generous response from the winners. Really appreciate that. And I am sure all the people who took part in the pool will appreciate that too.

A big THANKS for those who took part and donated.

Nothing better to celebrate the Festival of Lights in this manner!!

*** Happy Deepavali ***

And if you did not read the SMS, here it is... (we shall spam, come what may ;-)

On this day of Great Lights, may God bless you to be:

Divine

Innovative

Welcoming

Ascending

Loving &

Inspiring ...

Yewwww as Aishu says...

12 Questions

Now that the greedy part has been covered, here are the details of the brainy part of our CCT09 Pool.

Total of 12 questions:

Smurf, UNO, MSG, Yahoo, Ipod (no one bothered to answer this!), Pseudo Sudoku (Very Easy :-), Mexico (Easy), DRAM (gauntlet picked up), Arabic (marhabatein! that is pidgin Arabic for you...), Taj from the top (my favourite in this round), Indiana Pi bill and the Marathon distance rounded the dozen.

Total of 49 correct answers and another score of wrong answers. But I was happy that people made honest attempts to solve them without referring to Google.

Congratulate yourselves for the good job done.

Now for the positions:

A BIG CONGRATULATIONS TO YADAVALLI FOR CRACKING TWO-THIRDS OF THE QUESTIONS THIS TIME. CHAALA MANCHI PANI!!!

Congrats to Amar, Anand Re and Suryanshu for running closely.

All four of you get the sans-Google prizes.

Details will follow.

That much for the CCT09, folks.

Thanks for the active participation.

The fun & pleasure were all mine.

Any goof-ups - Mea Culpa and if it was good, pat your shoulder for a GJD :-))

In the beginning there was...

... nothing.

In the end, there was... Nothing again!

What is left are the good, bad and the ugly memories - in the reverse order of vaporising out of our mind. If that has not confused you, then congratulate yourselves! You are one of the sanest persons around.

Enough of the fluff, I hear. (Nice rhyming, eh?)

For the consolidated view of the pool check the first picture above - yes, the one that hurts the eye the least ;-) (Refer to email for further details)

And if that has not helped you much by way of improving the mood, then there are some useless statistics and sobriquets for you in the next teal picture. Enjoy.

Oh, by the way, the answer to the last quiz question was that the two numeros indicate the marathon distance in miles and kilometres respectively. A number of you got it right... Amar, Anand Re, Madhavan, Suryanshu and Yadavalli. Nice one fellers ;-)

Tomorrow - more about the quiz and the winners.

Till then...

Shane fries the Kiwis!

I hate those words: "I told you so!". But what to do, we are like that only.

Australia has just cleaned up the Kiwis for the umpteenth time. Only saving grace is that Ponting did not score yet another century; but... Watson forgot how to get out. Remember he was not able to score any runs at all - hardly three games ago... Form is temporary, as they say.

Seeing Watson's plight of not-able-to-get-out, I can draw a parallel to Adam (yeah, the First-ever man on earth). Apparently after all that sinful apple scene etc., satan tried to make Adam die. But Adam was like,"How to die? I don't know how to die!". And Bible goes on to say that the satan had to try for close to thousand years before he could teach Adam to die! Similarly Shane Watson has decided not to know of how to get out... (Heard this on Joseph Prince's Singapore preaching programme on a French TV channel in Geneva yesterday! Very Illuminating. Amen.)

Ok, enough cribbing.

Well played, Aussies. In a way, all the teams were kind of under-cooked except the Aussies (who strangely had lost that aura due to the Ashes loss; but people forgot the 6-1 pommie-thrashing!).

Pool went off smoothly & Sharath killed the finals.

More about the consolidated position, quiz answers/winners etc. in the next post.

Sheared by the Sheep!

One of the best known Kiwi statistic is that their population is a total of 4.3 million (almost as much as Singapore) and has at least ten sheep to every human being :-) And when you eat that lamb chop next time, it is more than 50% probable that the dead animal was from New Zealand.

Hmmm...

With all those statistics, it is astonishing to see that a group of no-famers have made it to yet another world tournament's finals. Only a total of four - Vettori, McCullum, Taylor and Bond, would make it to any of the other teams. As for others - "Thank You very much!"

My only gripe is that yet another trophy is being handed over to Australia on a platter. Well, the Kiwis, as Vettori said, have 'inconsistency' as their middle name. And with the form that the Aussies have got (that Pakistan game was to cover the law-of-averages), I can only hope that Vettori was 'double-bluffing' (God only knows, what that means!)

Suryanshu cleaned up the pool. He must have had a direct line with the Lord up there :-))

The penultimate question on this edition of sans-google quiz drew two correct answers. Madhavan and Yadavalli gave the "Squaring the Circle" concept. Kudos guys.

To elaborate this a bit further, the great pi is defined as the ratio of the perimeter of a circle to its diameter. And if its value is three, then the corresponding polygon to satisfy the definition of pi is a... hexagon.

In 1897, the Indiana state senate wanted to pass an act which would have mandated the value of pi to, among other things 4 and even 3.

I am told that there are some other peculiar laws/acts still in vogue in the great US of A! If you know of any, you can leave them in the Comments section.

Now for the last question of this edition. You have time till Monday 5th October night SGT to answer this question.

A simple one:

• When is 26.21875 equal to 42.195?
  

Monday 5th October is the finals. So far 29 of you have worked hard to take part in the game. It would be great if there are as many guesses for the finals as well. Same rules as the semis.

Have a great Sunday!!

The Complete Shut Out :-))))

The game was rightly summed up by one wag in the Cricinfo commentary:

"Police have apprehended 11 men masquerading as the England cricket team last week - they were seen acting out of character and profited greatly from the deception. Normal service has now been resumed."

And thank the Lord, my prophecy did not become true...

A few posts ago, I said (wishfully, of course!) that India will beat the Aussies into all colours... now the reverse seems to be fully on the cards :-()

The pool was normal. Unusually a number of stop-losses kicked in!

Answer to yesterday's sans-Google question:

A number of you got it: The Taj Mahal in Agra

As far who got it... here we go! Dhivya / Mahesh / Rohit / Pradeip / Ishan / Suryanshu / Guru / Madhavan / Yadavalli - That is nine of them - same as the pseudo-Sudoku question. Way to go!!

And the next question is:

• If this had passed, then all the circles in Indiana would have become hexagons. What are we talking about?
  

Keep smiling.

Semi Finals Are Here!!

At the beginning of September, the ODI rankings were: SA: 1, Ind: 2, Aus: 3, Eng: 4, Nzl: 5 and Pak: 6.

But who is still alive in CCT09? Our dear mid-table mediocrities. Vagaries of life in general and cricket in particular....

Semis guesses were interesting as you can see from the above. Biju cleaned it up pretty much just for keeping faith on the Pommies. Remember what I said about the English...

Now for the 1st Semi-Final - The grudge match between Australia and England; Oh! it has been ages since they played last!! A whole 11 days have elapsed since they played last ;-)

A few changes to the guess rules:

You have to give:

Who wins
Runs Margin [1-50, 51-100, 101-150, 151++]
Wickets Margin [1-3, 4-5, 6-8, 9-10]
First Innings Score [1-160, 161-230, 231-265, 266-295, 296+]
Number of Sixers [0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10++]

Keep your guesses coming in by 7pm SGT on Gandhi Jayanthi.

The sans-Google quiz had two correct answers from Rohit and Mahesh today. Rohit accepted that he went to the omniscient source aka Google to get some inputs - even Google was not conclusive enough I believe. But not for me, as the big G gave me this.

By the way, the answer to yesterday's question is: All those words have one thing in common: They all have descended from the great Arabic language. No fruits, no cocktails.. good try, folks!

And today, we have another pictorial twist...

• Which place?

To see it bigger, click on the picture at the beginning of the post.

Answers in the usual mode. Attractive prizes for the trivia winners.

Tale of two matches: Thriller and Time-Filler!

Thank you, Younis and boys. You tried valiantly to make it possible. But then, you should have lost the first game against us - yeah, right! You did not have any right to thrash us like that last Saturday... Let bygones be bygones. We shall thrash the Aussies red, blue and green when they come to India. Oh, we have the Champions League in between to forget this ignominy.

And did you see that our bowlers bowled like men possessed today, with some juice in the wicket!! Wrong timing, wrong place!! Let us blame it on Cricket South Africa for having doctored the wickets against India.

On one side people have started to talk about Dhoni's honeymoon being over - if my memory serves right, he has been the Indian captain who has had the longest honeymoon; a honeymoon which was built on hardwork, initiative and sterling performances. So, for the doubters, here is my advice: Go Eat Grass.

The pool today has seen two new winners. KP and Laks. Lady luck smiled at last!

Semi Finals guesses and the results will be published tomorrow.

Now for the sans-Google trivia quiz:

I threw the gauntlet. Three people picked it up and came up winners.

The answer is DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory; a small
measure used to measure among other things Scotch Whiskey; and the 3-like
symbol is actually called Ezh which denotes one measure of Dram) You are free to google now for further information as I did not know Ezh either!

Congratulations to Bhuvana (woke me up in the middle of the night; only the better-half can commit such atrocities and demand credit for giving the right answer!), Anand Re & Ganesh TCS. The men attributed their answers to, what else, drinking! Drinking does help!

And the question of the day is:

A little bit of etymology. The following four words have something in common. What is it?

• Admiral, Lime, Tamarind, Apricot

Keep them coming. Have fun.