Sort of by request  thread - this is a good place in which to hurl rubbishy posts - or any you think may get rubbished - or indeed any handy tips about anything - within limits. Survival on this site aides for instance or how to make a joke without causing a snarl up or mentioning Jesus - or the Daily Mail - or on anything about Britain in a good light. Household tips we are surely all agreed will just not do here. 

My tip of the day is personal - Duck P... submerge again right now!

My tip of the day is also personal: don't be a mardy and grumpy old cow.

I was sharp with both LiR and Nielsen this morning and I am sorry.

But I do like a Tip of the Day thread. I immediately thought of the Delphic Oracle - I wonder if anyone ever got mardy with the ladies there and told them to stuff their advice?

Temperance wrote:

I immediately thought of the Delphic Oracle - I wonder if anyone ever got mardy with the ladies there and told them to stuff their advice?

I thought the principal reason that the Delphic Oracle was generally held in such esteem being so rarely wrong, was  because she always carefully worded her advice in such an ambiguous manner that even if people chose to act on her advice and then fail diasasterously, she, or at least her priests, could always go back to the original wording of the prophesy and say that she had actually been right all along and that the supplicant had just interpreted the advice wrongly.

For example in 560 BC Croesus of Lydia consulted the Oracle as to whether he should make war on the Persians. She responded that if Croesus did make war on them he would destroy a mighty empire. Perhaps suspicious that this was indeed ambiguous enough to cover whatever might transpire, Croesus, after making a hefty donation to secure a favourable response, asked further: "Would his monarchy last long?" The Pythia answered that "Whenever a mule shall become sovereign king of the Medians, then, Lydian Delicate-Foot, flee by the stone-strewn Hermus, flee, and think not to stand fast, nor shame to be chicken-hearted."

Croesus thought it impossible that a mule should become king of the Medes and thus believed that he and his issue would never be out of power, and therefore he should not be "chicken-hearted" but should promptly attack Persia - which he duly did. However after a disastrous campaign it was his empire, not that of the Persians, that was defeated, thereby fulfilling the Pythia's initial prophecy - just not his interpretation of it. He had apparently forgotten that Cyrus, the Persian victor, was half Mede (by his mother) and half Persian (by his father), and therefore could be considered a "mule", thereby confirming her second statement. Croesus was captured by the Persians and probably executed by them so he never got the chance to go back to Delphi to complain and ask for his money back.

However one who certainly did get a bit mardy with the Pythia's pronouncements - or rather her tight-lipped refusal to pronounce at all - was Alexander the Great. He visited the Delphic Oracle in 336 BC wishing to hear a prophecy that he would soon conquer the entire ancient world. To his surprise the oracle refused a direct comment and asked him to come later. Furious, Alexander dragged Pythia by the hair out of the chamber until she screamed "You are invincible, boy!" The moment he heard these words he dropped her, saying, "Now I have my answer". (Although of course he wasn't invincible, eventually succumbing to too much booze and/or not enough clean water).

Another one who definitely didn't like the Oracle's response was the emperor Nero. When he visited Delphi in 67 AD the Oracle told him, "Your presence here outrages the god you seek. Go back, matricide! The number 73 marks the hour of your downfall!" Nero had indeed murdered his mother eight years earlier but he was so enraged by the Pythia's response that he had her dragged out from the shrine and had her burned alive. Nero nevertheless took her prophetic words to heart believing he would have a long reign and die at 73. Instead his reign came to a short end after a revolt by Galba - who was 73 years of age at the time.

So I guess the tip in dealing with prophetesses (as with lawyers) is to always consider the exact words very carefully and never just read into them whatever you hoped they'd mean.

Courtesy of Touro College (a bit iffy when it comes to their commitment to "furthering Jewish heritage and ideology" but bang-on with their advice to students participating on the college's online message-board).



Delphi predictions often led to unfortunate outcomes, mainly because their vagueness encouraged misinterpretation. However sometimes this vagueness could work to the good - as with the priestess's advice to Solon just before he was set to assume a standard dictatorial and tyrannical rule over Athens;

Seat yourself now amidships, for you are the pilot of Athens. Grasp the helm fast in your hands; you have many allies in your city.

Despite the fact that it's difficult to grasp a helm when one is sitting amidships in vessels of the period, Solon apparently understood that the oracle probably wasn't the world's greatest sailor, took the implied hint to mean that tyranny wasn't the way to go any more, and abandoned his original plan. Instead he instituted the first ever constitutional democracy in Europe (and a written one at that), the first recorded graduated tax system whereby revenue was collected proportionate to people's means to pay it, and the first ever legal system involving trial by jury.

A famous piece of advice that was disregarded was that tip of the day given by Thomas More to Thomas Cromwell:


If you will follow my poor advice you shall, in counsel given to his Grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never tell him what he is able to do, so shall you show yourself a true faithful servant, and a right worthy Counsellor.  For if the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.


But I suppose Cromwell, whose Bible was Machiavelli's The Prince, would have argued it all depended what you meant by "ought to do":


A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.


Following all the rules listed above, worthy as they may seem, would, at best, make things here so bland and boring: the rough and tumble of debate is fun. I don't want to be a very polite robot, afraid all the time of saying or doing the wrong thing. We are human and we all err in our dealings and discussions with one another. The important thing is the advice of Step 10 of the Twelve Steps: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. My version is: Try not to act like a prat, but if you do, acknowledge it and do something about it. Apology for earned guilt is not being weak. It is hard  though - we are all irritating and irritable at times, but, if there is real liking and respect, we get over things and we get over ourselves. Not seeing faces and hearing tones of voice does make message board stuff difficult, I admit. But at least we don't follow one of Machiavelli's other useful tips here - or not often anyway:


Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot.


PS I did think it was funny about Alexander the Great having a hissy fit at the Oracle. He would, wouldn't he?

I have probably broken every suggestion in nord's list above apart from endless links..... and a few more besides, there are a few other tips that could be added such as hogging a thread or the feeling the need to contribute to everything posted and somehow even kill it off. In the site's graveyard of threads it used to bother me to became the last poster.  That was in the days when more of us posted and then like me faded away. Too much P was not a good thing...… and or as some might have it any P at all.

Regards, P. Down periscope, dive dive dive. 

PS The Pythia always had two back ups so knocking off one would not resolve much.

This was a good tip of the day, given by the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition during a debate in the Commons in 2013:

Mr Miliband, who said he opposed holding an in/out referendum, said Mr Cameron was "going to put Britain through years of uncertainty, and take a huge gamble with our economy."

Poor Ed - who remembers him now?

"Doubt means don't" is supposed to be good advice: trouble is one would end up never doing or saying anything.

I'm sure I've been the last poster in some threads, Priscilla.  To contribute something to the thread my tip - one should make sure one's ethernet cable (if using one) is attached to the computer to ensure broadband connection but that is maybe more a LiR "note to self".  A few times lately (in my Macbook my wifi card having become detached some time ago - well it's not working anyway) the ethernet cable I use to connect to the internet has worked loose and when I have tried to post something I get a message "You are not connected to the internet".  I daresay everyone else is connected on their Wifis though.

I mentioned the marks of "witches" caves thread recently as a thread which I found of interest but hadn't commented on because I hadn't/haven't sufficient knowledge to make a worthwhile contribution. If I don't contribute to a thread it doesn't always mean I haven't read it or even that I'm not interested in it.

Perhaps we should all stop worrying and go back to enjoying posting - say what we mean and mean what we say without being mean.


Here is an excerpt from chapter VII, “A Mad Tea-party,” from Alice in Wonderland:

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

I'm not sure whether I identify more with Alice or the Dormouse.

I wrote:

I'm not sure whether I identify more with Alice or the Dormouse.

It's the dormouse! Talk about dopey - just been speaking to Priscilla in real(ish) life, and I am mortified because I didn't get the joke about "tip". I thought it meant "hint" (which is does, of course). I'm going to the tip now with all my flattened Tetra-Paks - when I get back I'll think of something to tip in here. Perhaps we can recycle old arguments about something and turn them into something useful.

Are we supposed to leave a tip too - for the management? They (He) do (does) deserve it, putting up with us lot - honestly.

"Perhaps we should all stop worrying and go back to enjoying posting - say what we mean and mean what we say without being mean."


That's a good tip, Temperance.


Kind regards from your Paul.