A mong the many fine anniversaries in prospect this year, not the least is the 60th birthday of Murphy’s Law, alternatively — though erroneously — known as Sod’s Law or, if you’re really into this kind of thing, Finagle’s Law.
This is the commonly held perception that the world is inherently a perverse place; in other words, if something can go wrong, it will. The proverbial example of the principle is, of course, that if you drop a slice of toast, it will land buttered side down. There are countless others; people have written entire books of them and Web sites abound (including www.murphys-laws.com, to which my thanks).
The military is fond of: “The more advanced your equipment, the further you will be from civilization when it fails.” Parents will relate to: “No child ever throws up in the toilet.” Drivers will appreciate: “The other lane is always faster.” Shoppers will relate to: “The simpler and quicker your transaction, the more complex and time-consuming the transaction of the person in front of you in the queue.”
We can all enjoy: “The paper is strongest along the perforated line,” “You always find something in the last place you look” (a necessary corollary of which is: “You will never find something in the last place you look but in the first place, where you did not see it first time around”) and (my personal favorite) “Any foreign body in your shoe will invariably work itself into the position where it causes most discomfort.”
It is worth noting that there is no point disputing Murphy’s Law (ML). It is both correct and self-proving, as can be shown by the following: ML states that if anything can go wrong, it will. ML itself can therefore go wrong. If ML can go wrong, then things can sometimes go right. We know from experience that things do sometimes go right. Ergo, ML can go wrong. Ergo, ML is correct and self-proving.
There is, however, some dispute about its precise origin. The principle it embodies has obviously existed since the dawn of mankind, and dedicated researchers from the American Dialect Society have found it described in print as early as 1877. But according to a fascinating series of articles by one Nick T Spark in the Annals of Improbable Research, there can be little doubt that Murphy’s Law as we now know it is named after Edward A. Murphy Jr, a test engineer for the McDonnell Douglas aerospace manufacturer during a series of G-force experiments carried out in 1949 by the US air force to assess the tolerance of the human body to acceleration.
One experiment apparently involved a set of 16 sensors attached to the subject’s body. These could be mounted in one of two ways, and one of Murphy’s assistants installed all of them the wrong way round, resulting in a zero reading. According to Robert Murphy, Edward’s son, the words his father uttered at the time were along the lines of: “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.”
This we might term the original Murphy’s Law. However George Nichols, another engineer present at the experiment, recalls the phrase as: “If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will,” a rather cruel jibe later more kindly condensed by the McDonnell Douglas team to: “If it can happen, it will happen.” Major John Paul Stapp, the subject of the experiment, then reportedly summed up the newly coined law at a press conference some days later as: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
The first mentions of Murphy’s Law in this context occur in print in 1952 and 1955, whereafter it gradually became a commonplace, although in a multitude of variants. Finagle’s Law is actually a corollary to Murphy’s, and states: “Anything that can go wrong, will — and at the worst possible moment.”
All of which, of course, only serves to bear out Murphy’s third law of journalism (just invented by me), which reads: “The likelihood of your misquoting someone is directly proportional to their present or future importance.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist