Today's ET Article that caught me in face ::
" A 3 day trip to a hotel suiote in space can ost you 4 million $ in 2012 "

My take: Buy a hotel here on earth with that money - Practical and profitable investment

SCMHRD FILES

ONE fundoo definition of Statistics that you may not find in any book:

" Statistics is like a bikini, what it reveals is interesting, what it hides is vital "

Wah Wah !!!!!

SCMHRD FILES ::

Came through an interesting post by abhiji bhaduri -

"Where do you see the future of the work and what skills should young professionals build to be ready for further challenges?"

The future of work can only be commented on based on how one defines the term "work". If we define work to be the physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something, then it doesn't take much genius to say that as society progresses the physical aspect of every kind of work gets minimized through technology. People are inherently lazy – why do you think the TV Remote was invented? Less physical effort is a preferred state of being.
That leaves the mental effort part of work that needs unraveling. Ever wondered what makes computer games successful? There lies the key to what makes for a happy work experience. I remember playing this DOS based game in the late seventies called Rogue. It was quite a cult game and strangely it had no cool graphics, no sound effects and only one cool feature called "The Boss Key". If you pressed F10, (presumably when the boss walked in) it would temporarily create a very official looking screen which we could even type in stuff. As soon as the boss was gone, we could press F10 again to resume the game where we had left it! The first blueprint of what Heaven is all about.
Here's what a fan had to say about this game- and this is almost 15 years later I stopped playing it.
"You ever heard them talk of the rogue-style games? Did you ever wonder what they mean by this? Well, in short words: Rogue was the first open ended ever changing RPG (that is Role Playing Game for the uninitiated). Every time you play it, it comes up with a new dungeon. Your task is simply to stay alive for as long as possible, go deeper into the dungeon and collect as much gold as possible. On your way you meet monsters, find treasures, magical objects etc. This game comes along very simple but casts its spell on you immediately. You sit there trying to proceed further and further, building up your character to explore the next level and get some more gold." What does that tell us about the future of work?

Lesson No 1: "Every time you play it comes up with a new dungeon".

Translation : The work has to provide for an interesting task that changes often enough to sustain the employee\'s attention span. If the employee is unable to achieve success at the current level, there is still an escape mechanism that allows you to bypass a task that is boring or one that does not value add to the employee.

Lesson No 2: "Your task is simply to stay alive for as long as possible, go deeper into the dungeon and collect as much gold as possible."

Translation - The work must provide for a sense of accomplishment. And an opportunity to collect as much gold as possible. (You didn\'t need me to translate that last bit, did you?)

Lesson No 3: "On your way you meet monsters, find treasures, magical objects etc."

Translation - Meeting monsters, yes that's what some people call co-workers or clients, can be fun as long as you have the chance to kill them. Well the game certainly allowed that to happen. Some monsters in Rogue were just irritants. You could kill them without much effort. With some just needed you to figure out what armor to use. And then as you moved into the most complex levels (I swear I actually made it briefly to Level Eight for full five minutes before being slayed by a Troll). That thrill of being in Level Eight of Rogue was no less than what a CEO experiences when he/she first enters the Board Room. The fact that I had made it to that level in a game did more wonders for my ego than any promotion has ever done – not that I have been promoted very often. All because I had the satisfaction of continuously learning some nuance that helped me to master that game.

Lesson No 4: "This game comes along very simple but casts its spell on you immediately. You sit there trying to proceed further and further, building up your character to explore the next level and get some more gold."

Translation : Work must allow the person not just a feeling of accomplishment, but also the opportunity to better oneself. Rogue taught me to get up after each defeat. I would dust myself clean and rub my hands in grim determination to reach a higher level in the game. Some days I did and some days when I didn\'t, I used to toss and turn in bed wondering why I had gotten knocked off at an embarrassingly low level. How many work environments fire up this passion in people?

If you can learn about "the future of work" from a computer game, I guess it is only logical to draw lessons from the people who play these games. What makes a successful video/ computer game player?

Lesson 1: Keep learning new games.
Lesson 2: Try to figure out the design and logic of the game.

Lesson 3: Enjoy the Game

Lesson 4: Get a life

U are beautiful

I sit by the clock,
Memories run wild,
Life is bliss,
Now I know it why.
Present has never been so surreal,
The future so bright,
My heart palpitates a million beats,
Only to say you are mine.
Every breath that gushes and simmers,
Ushers in me, a love so pure and divine.
Drop of tear that may numb your eye,
Lacerates the soul,
Devours my plight.
The touch of your hands, fingers so benign
Evanesces my worries,
Am I not on cloud nine?
There is always more to you than meets the eye,
You are truly God’s sweetest creation alive.
Mesmerized by your laughter;
I hold you close and near,
Just wanna say
U are beautiful dear ...

WHat, above, looks like a wierd work of atrpiece is work of jackson pollack..no this aint a picture that u get to seee using google earth or configuration of some heavenly aestroid..
The reason for it sharing space on my blog is that it is the costliest painting to be sold..

P.S 140 million bugs...( dont even know the zeroes in it )

Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

"Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.


I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A great speech i must say and so true......too many times we are so engrossed making plans for our future that we fail to take notice of the present...to quote john lennon :
" life is what happens when u are busy making other plans "
that is the crux of whole point...day in day out people concern themselves worrying about their future progress, life that they forget to live in the present..ie in the moment...
I totally second his second story about not being trapped by dogma and living your own life..this sort of thing is so prevalent here in India, where by the tiem person takes account of his life he/she has to consult scores of people around and related to him from dad to friends to chacha, massa n all..only 5 % of them question themselves about what it is like they would really wanna do...
It is not that the our mind is oblivious to all these, just that for some it takes speeches, books and other stuff like these to show the light at the end of tunnel....

Watch this vedio : Steve jobs@ stanford

This is one helluva of article i found on net, talking about Belling the CAT...
For all my CAT compatriots, do check it out....

Arun "PsychoDementia" Jagannathan's article on how to take a consultant's approach at belling the CATWith about a month or so to go, the question that junta is asking at this point is not "Do I have it in me to crack CAT?" as much as "Do I have it in me to crack me in crack CAT in a month?"

Now let us presume that you present your problem to a management consultant like say McKinsey, what would they come up with? Remember they would give you only strategic advice, no actual implementation level micromanagement. Here are a few pointers that could actually turn up in their analysis report:



(1) Don't boil the ocean

Simply put, don't try to do something unimaginably huge (boil the ocean) to bring results that are not proportionate (get salt). This ways you will just cause more anguish when you realize half way through that the latent point of boiling for the ocean is pretty huge. Another way to put it is: Work smart, not hard.

Try to come up with a list of possible tasks for CAT and try figuring out what the amount of effort required to do it is. At the end of it, you can either lessen the effort or cross it out completely. Here is an example. A lot of you may be wondering if it is really wise to "do" the word-list. Go through a realistic run of where you are. This is a good time to go through the kind of words given over the last 4 years (over which CAT has kind of streamlined the questions) and figure if you really need to go through those huge word-lists. Amazingly at the end of the exercise, you might want to do away with it all together, or go through a selective portion just to ramp up your rusted skills. (For example, you might decide to do only the "High Frequency" words from Barron's GRE.)

(2) Pluck the low-hanging fruits first

An important point that many students don't realize at this juncture, due to immense pressure, is that it makes more sense for one to consolidate what he/she knows, rather than make an immature attempt to try learning everything. Do not attempt anything that is difficult. I have seen many students coming to me at the nth moment asking if they should be attempting "Permutation Combination". My simple answer is - If you have not done it in your schooling, if you have not done it in college, if you have not done it through out your CAT prep so far, then the chances that on November 21st the neurons in your brain actually go into a synaptical surge and the answer will plop in front of you are .........well, to be frank - quite bleak! Rather I would strengthen topics I know well - percentages, profit-loss, mensuration etc.

On the flip side, is it wise to be completely ignorant about these topics? The answer is a resounding NO!!!! I strongly suggest you take out some time (a few hours perhaps from an otherwise eventful study schedule) for each of these dreaded topics and figure out which are the formulae and basic types of problem. The test-setters of the more diabolic variety are known to sneak in a few deceptively. Most test-takers are blissfully unaware of this till the coaching institutes print a bold "SITTER" next to that question a day after the CAT and the cutoff seems all the more further away. Better safe than sorry!

(3) Think out of the box

Edward De Bono once famously remarked "An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgments simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore."

Try to ensure that whatever you do from now on is not something that is mechanical or by rote, but something that involves you actively in the process. So take up each problem and try figuring out stuff like - can it work with some variation? How can anyone twist this problem? Is there a simpler way of doing this? How I can design a problem for someone along these lines? etc. etc. In short - try to "internalize" the problem you are solving.

A classic example is the mock CATs you have taken so far. Even for those questions which have helped you inch towards the elusive cut-offs - try to figure which were ill-considered attempts. I have seen many instances in the past when my reason for choosing a correct answer was preposterous to say the least (I have, in good humor and on occasions, picked up answers because, from among others, it "sounded" correct!) and yet managed to get them right. Try to sit and figure if the same problem has a better way of doing it.

(4) Peel the onion

Layer by layer......one thing at a time

Let us presume you have a problem with reading large data in DI. In short, number crunching is not exactly one of your virtues, (normally these are areas you would not touch with a ten-foot pole!), yet is a necessary evil which cannot be avoided (like say P&C). We need to figure out how best to deal with this.

Take a couple of the mocks you have taken and try figuring out how you have done in it. See what is it that actually stopped you from getting in the top percentile. "I suck at numbers" is an answer which will neither aid your morale nor help you analyze yourself better. Be more objective and tough. Speed? Bad at approximation? The questions were too ambiguous? Whatever the reasons - try making a list of those things. Now instead of racking your brain alone over what can be done for that, speak to someone at your institute. Better still, catch a friend/mentor who has "been there and done that" for his/her insights on what can be done to help bridge this gap. Remember that you may also use the "boiling the ocean" principle here and remove any ideas of indulging in frivolous activities like learning Vedic mathematics at this point.

(5) Pareto's principle

The 80/20 rule. Some of the variations are :
20% of the time goes in doing 80% of the tasks, 20% of the business brings 80% of the revenue,20% of the world controls 80% of the money etc. The point here is: Try to figure which is the 80% that is bringing you the marks and focus on that. I read somewhere what one of the CAT 2003 100%iler had written - he had wanted to maximize on Verbal and tried to get cutoff in quant. And sure he maximized in Verbal with a score of 45 (and just around 17.5 in QA)!! There is no use spending all 1hour in quant and getting 2 marks more than the cutoff and spending 20mins in verbal and get barely get the cutoff.

(6) Parkinson's Law

The law states - "Work expands to fill the time available to do it" I think the scourge of every self-respecting graduate is doing a "night-out" to write that college journal a day before the submission. And we carry this habit with us to the work place too. Just look around you it keeps happening all the time - software project, advertising campaigns, government decisions - you name it! So is it with CAT.

Set yourself challenging schedules and stick to it. Tell yourself you are going to analyze those dreaded mock cats which have been piling on a corner for the last few months. Sounds impossible right? But as the Nike ad says "Just do it!" Even if you are not able to complete it, so be it, at the least you started and finished in a go. Keep challenging yourself; try sneaking out every last minute you have to get something done. Do those distasteful tables when you are having your smoke after lunch. Do those obnoxious RC practices when you are reading the morning newspaper.
And remember you cannot really challenge yourself unless you have a hard target to achieve.

(7) The fish cannot bat and I cannot swim

Words from Boycott could not be truer in the CAT perspective. Realize what your areas of strength and areas of weaknesses are. But still at the end of the day there will be the odd ball "stud" who licks the field clean. So in your approach you would be wise if you remember to steer clear of any ego-issues. Don't try tackling that extra toughie DI problem set which goes into 3rd decimals of approximation or the arcane RC passage on Madhubani paintings just because you are out there trying to prove you too are one. The point in case is that if you were one, you would not have been struggling.

Last year there was this guy in IIT Chennai. He was a math and physics Olympiad with an IIT-JEE AIR of 12. He ended up with a 100%ile (and a score of 103 in CAT 2003!). He went on to join IIM-B. Realize that there are always going to be guys like this. Instead of worrying about them, realize that at the most there are going to be around 100 odd guys like this. Forget about them. Think about the 1100 others who are vying for the same seat as you. And if you are really bothered about such guys, then stock your fridge with some cold beer!


(8) Fail to plan then you plan to fail

Put in excruciating detail into the planning/scoping work before you start out. Make sure every waking hour is accounted for. Doesn't mean you have to go overboard and start planning to account for each minute. Rather, a detailed account of how you are going to spend time over the next month. A caveat to the fore-mentioned point. At times we do things just because it was in the original plan. Make sure your plan is flexible. If a week before CAT you figure that doing more practice in RC is going to pay off, so be it!! But make sure you constantly check your plan and ask "Is it the right thing to do?" rather than "Am I doing it correctly?"

(9) Life is what happens when you are busy making plans - John Lennon (1940-1980)

Some words of wisdom that I keep telling myself everyday, CAT or no CAT. "The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. "

At the end of the day it is a just an exam. Nothing more. Nothing less. No reason why you should treat it differently. No reason why you should worry more. No reason why you should not think about other things in life. No reason why you should not keep your cool. If you were expecting a list of dos and don'ts I am afraid I might have disappointed you. But this is not meant to serve as one in the first place - the institutes are already doing a pretty good job of that. What I have done is tried summarizing a few points (which I believe are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive) to give you a checklist against which you can verify the usefulness of everything that you would be doing from now on.

SOme etymology lessons for u...

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water

temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to

be.

Here are some facts about the 1500's: These are interesting...

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in

May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting

to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour.

Hence, the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house

had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and

men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By

then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.

Hence,the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."


Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood

underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the

cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it

rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall

off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed

a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess

up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung

over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into

existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt.

Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get

slippery in the winter when wet , so they spread thresh (straw) on the

floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more

thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping

outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying

a "thresh hold."

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)


In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that

always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things

to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They

would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold

overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in

it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge

hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special.

When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It

was a sign of wealth that a man could "bring home the bacon." They would

cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew

the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content

caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning

death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years

or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of

the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper

crust."


Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would

sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking

along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.

They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family

would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would

wake up. Hence, the custom of holding a "wake".

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of

places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the

bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these

coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the

inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they

would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the

coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to

sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the

bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "

dead ringer."

And that's the truth... Now , whoever said that History was boring !