Botanists for Social Justice: Rigging the Tournament of Lilies
Ladies, gentlemen, and delicious persons who do not conform to simplistic binary conceptions of gender,
Those of you who have had occasion to engage in Botany for any length of time will doubtless have uncovered this Appalling Secret: whether one wins a Contest of Strength or Blood or Beauty is determined almost entirely by whether one is the challenger, and barely at all by how many vicars one’s plant has supped on lately.
What should be an honourable contest of luck and skill is, in truth, more a matter of ill-mannered shoving. Which has its place, to be sure. But here – here, I say it is ungentlemanly.
Well, delicious friends, acquaintances, and persons who occasionally send me heavily armed rodents, I say that we are Londoners. And if Londoners know anything, we know how to queue. Even if, as on this occasion, orderly queuing requires a modicum of Mathematics.
My proposal: by adopting a spirit of scientific collaboration and postlapsarian amity, every one of us can win the Tournament. For this to be possible, we will need at least seven botanists (a propitious number in the Neath, to be sure). I estimate that to achieve this, each of us will need to take around 48 actions with an average profit of one echo or more per action.
Edit: the Tournament has been fixed, or at least changed so that challengers no longer have a significant advantage. So Queuing is no longer feasible, or indeed necessary. As such, I’ve canceled the second Queue, which fortunately, as it turns out, had not yet begun. The first Queue will, if my proposal meets with general consent, continue in the form of a free-for-all for another month to improve Tyler and Katarina’s chances of obtaining Rosettes.
edited by Flyte on 7/24/2013