Murphy's Law & Friends

In the recent past a friend of mine posted an amusing note on ‘Facebook’ that gave several examples of ‘Murphy’s Law’.

Although it gave rise to some chuckles it was, in all honesty, a little short of the mark in terms of accuracy.

We shall try to put the record straight.

Murphy’s Law states that: ‘If anything can go wrong it will.”

Example: A piece of wire cut to exactly the right length will always be too short.

That is it. That is all there is to it.

Now let’s look at another one.

Sod’s Law.

Sod’s Law says, “Anything that can go wrong will always go wrong at the worst possible moment”.

Example: You climb into the attic of the house in the middle of the night and pick your way over several obstructions until you get to the far end. It is at this point that the batteries in your flashlight will go flat.

McFudgen’s Law.

You have never heard of it? Sorry about that, but it is a very common one.

McFudgen’s Law tells us that a piece of bread that is dropped on the floor will always land buttered side down.

We are aware, before you decide to put me right on this—

that this does not happen in practice. However, that is rather the point.

It means that in the event of a 50-50 chance of something happening the odds will favour the worst outcome.

We know that to be true.

The interesting part of this must be the origins of McFudgen’s Law. Let’s look at that.

There exist in Glasgow, Scotland, certain areas that contain what are known as ‘tenements’.

These tenements are high-rise buildings that are known, in the United States, as ‘Projects’. In the old days there were no lifts in the tenements so, for people living at, or near, the top, it was a long haul up many stairs with the shopping.

In the morning, Mum would be likely to kick out the wain (‘Wee One’ = child) to go out and play on the street. He would go off down the stairs and join his friends out in the road to play fitba’ (‘football’).

At lunchtime, Mum spread beef dripping with a pinch of salt scattered on it over a slice of bread. This was a cheap meal for a small person. She goes to the window – or balcony, and shouts down to him, “Hey, Jimmy! Here’s ye’re piece.” She might include the expression ‘ya wee… er… child’.

The slice of bread and dripping would now be hurled out into space for Jimmy to catch. At some point in its downward flight it would begin to oscillate in the air. Jimmy is now not sure where it is going to be at any one point at its arrival at his level.

Inevitably, it will miss him completely and land, dripping side down, on the cobbled road.

McFudgen noticed this and concluded that if there were a fifty-fifty chance of any specific result it would usually end up at the worst possible outcome – doggy-poos notwithstanding!

There is now other small piece of information that can be gleaned from this tale.

I mentioned that Mum would shout down to Jimmy that his ‘piece’ was now on its way to him.

‘Piece’?

Ah, well.

In the far distant past when many Scots were living off the land on small cottages called crofts they lived in the crofts with their animals. This was a practical way of keeping warm in the winter, which was often cruelly cold.

The wife would make round, flat, oaty cakes. Modern oaty cakes are thick and contain sugar and honey – perhaps cinnamon, too. These were very simple, just crushed oats and flour with a bit of salt.

When these discs were prepared for cooking, Wife would mark the cake in lines across the diameter rather as you would cut a pizza but without going right through the cake.

After cooking the cake would be broken up into triangular pieces with curved ends called ‘petticoat tails’ and placed into a lined drawer in the dresser next to the door.

On his way out in the morning, husband would pocket his bottle of water and take out a section of the cake from the drawer because that was going to be his lunch that day.

His wife would call after him, “Ha’e ye got ye’re piece?”

“Aye, Hen,” he would answer.

To this day, Scotsmen will still ask you if you have your piece or have you had your piece. Now it means ‘lunch’ or ‘snack’. But in the old days it was life or death.

Now you know.

Never let it be said that I don’t come up with some weird things from time to time – but, at least, it’s all true.

Beauty in the Beast

In the past during this conversation with you, remarks have been made about ‘personal appearances’. I am not referring to actors and actresses making ‘personal appearances’ at film premiers or people who think that they are more important than anyone else opening supermarkets and issuing edicts to us lesser mortals.

Perhaps some people are more important than others but this is, of necessity, only a temporary period during which they occupy positions of power over us minions—and, no, I am not despicable.

[This last comment was designed to show that I am familiar with the current status of the entertainment industry.]

The matter to which I refer is how people ‘look’, how they appear to others and, possibly, themselves.

I must confess to being superbly handsome. In fact, a colleague of mine, called Mohammad Sukry who lives in the North East of Malaysia, and I are noted to be the two most handsome men in the peninsular. Curiously, we are both long term ex-military and both achieved the same rank whilst in service. Although we were in the Air Forces of different Nations we still think the same; our thought processes run parallel to each other.

That is part of what we are considering today.

Mindsets.

How do you perceive yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning—every morning?

Do you look in the mirror in the bathroom and have a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach?

Notice that the word I used was ‘perceive’. It is your ‘perception’ of yourself that is important here.

Very often, it is my contention, the face you are looking at in the mirror is not the real you. That may seem an odd statement but it is the truth. The person you are staring at is a picture of how you feel.

Many, many times I have addressed my classes and told them that, in order to boost themselves for the day, they should do the following exercise on a daily basis:

1.                  Enter the bathroom and lock the door.

2.                  Remove all your clothes.

3.                  Look into the mirror.

4.                  Say to yourself, “Wow! You are GREAT!”

5.                  Stand back and admire yourself.

6.                  Have a shave, shampoo, shower, clean your teeth and go to work.

7.                  Get dressed.

You may wish to insert ‘7’ into ‘6’.

You will not do this. Why? Because you will be embarrassed.

There is nobody else there in the bathroom with you and yet you will not do it.

Do this every morning. Not just once or twice but every morning. It is the start of a new, confident, you.

Does it matter what you look like?

No. It doesn’t.

Personality will out and that is something that comes from within.

They say that ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and it is partly true. Have you seen what your pet cat looks like without its skin? Quite repulsive, I assure you. Not something you would have on your lap to stroke.

That there is an inner beauty also goes without saying. I know many multi-millionaires who have attracted beautiful young ladies through their masculine inner beauty shining through.

Are those beautiful young ladies able to match that personality?

There’s the rub, as they say. When we say to a young lady (or handsome young man, if you are a lady), “My word, you are stunningly lovely,” you are referring to a physical beauty. This is not love but a form of lust welling up that is telling you that this is a person with whom you could very easily be intimate.

Now think about this.

Nobody wants to be ugly.

There is no person anywhere in the World that sets out with the idea of wanting to repel others by their physical appearance. Yes, there are people out there whose mental manoeuvrings are, possibly, less nimble than the rest of us but for ‘normal’ people the argument holds true.

How many times have you observed some nubile young actress, approached by a TV crew on the red carpet, simper into the microphone, “Oh, yes, thank you. It took so much effort and hard work to look like this.”

Well, alright, they don’t actually say that but the effect is the same.

Beauty, as with ugliness, is genetic. People are unattractive not through their own efforts but by the accident of birth.

How does this affect our mindset?

Because of the culture that we live in, a culture that has existed since time immemorial, we find certain forms attractive. Anyone who falls short of those ‘norms’ is increasingly unattractive.

We are aware that, in College, the ‘Jock’ and the ‘Prom Queen’ (to borrow a couple of Transatlatic words) are people ‘in demand’. Other students will lust after them.

As a result, these are people who may become spoilt. They are accustomed to getting who and what they want. This can lead to arrogance, an aloofness, that may make them seem cold and disinterested in their fellow people.

Those who are unattractive may become bitter, disillusioned or they may become reclusive.

In both cases people should realise that they have other qualities to offer. Qualities that may help them reach out and connect with others.

There is a saying that there is somebody for everyone. Finding that someone may be extremely difficult if you are at each extreme of the ‘beauty scale’; but you can make it easier by accepting yourself first.

Remember the bathroom exercise?

Now add:

8.       Everyone else is worthy, too.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories abound.

Sometimes they are confusing, sometimes they are quite convincing but, mostly, they are just laughable.

What do we do about those? Well, ‘laugh’ seems appropriate.

It may well be that some are serious and accurate. How do we know? We don’t. We read them and chuckle or we consider or we grimace and think that the theory is, if not entirely convincing it is, after all, plausible,

In our own minds it seems plausible. We are basing this agreement with the writer, or presenter, of this idea on our own previous experience and knowledge—sometimes our lack of knowledge.

We have been told that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima was the result of a tidal wave. It may be news to you that the Israelis used a deep-sea nuclear bomb to create the tidal wave; the meltdown never happened because aerial photographs of the nuclear power plant show that the radioactive core was removed for maintenance at the time of the tidal wave—thus rendering it inert.

Shocking, isn’t it?

You are, of course, aware that al-Qaeda, as a terrorist group, never really existed. It was a general idea—a hypothesis, if you will, that caught on and was encapsulated by the intelligence (sic) services to provide a point of aim for public hatred. Osama bin Laden was, no doubt (and maybe still is) a brilliant man but his ability to assemble disparate groups to do his bidding in an organised way is questionable. Thus we have the idea that others must have administered the crashing of aircraft into the Twin Towers, an abominable act. Perhaps the CIA or MOSSAD did it to pursue their own anti-Arab/Muslim agenda.

Plausible?

Is Osama bin Laden dead?

Who knows?

Who shot Kennedy?

Ah! The grassy knoll and the third gunman. Why not four? Or five? How convenient that the alleged perpetrator was shot on the scene by an enraged ‘bystander’!

Convenient juxtaposition of people.

Libya—especially Benghazi; Syria; Iraq; Afghanistan; North Pakistan? All are sources of material for conspiracists.

UFO’s, alien abductions and other ‘alien interferences’ with our lives have become a ubiquitous phenomena.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a notable mind, said that when you get to the point where you say, “I don’t know what it is,” that is where the conversation stops. We should not go on endlessly making suppositions to fill in the blanks in our heads. If it is ‘unidentified’ then that is the end—we cannot identify it and so it should remain.

A friend of mine went for some years without having a girlfriend. Another colleague suggested to me that my friend was a homosexual. When I asked him why he should suppose that he told me that he had not observed my friend with a female companion. I asked him if he had seen him with a male companion in a recreational role. He said that he had not so I told him that this was proof positive that my friend was a hermaphrodite.

We can make up anything from a lack of evidence.

An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

What about spraying chemicals from aeroplanes? This is a common conspiracy idea.

Commercial aircraft go up to thirty six thousand feet and spray the population with chemicals. Wonderful idea.

However, we should just look at that a tiny bit closer.

If I am on the ground under an aeroplane that is spraying something from thirty six thousand feet, no matter how toxic it might be, I am not going to throw myself into any sort of immediate panic. By the time the chemical gets to me—if it ever does get down this far, it will be so diluted as to be completely useless as any sort of biological agent.

Who orders this to be done? Are they people who live down here with us? People who will also get sprayed?

What is the supposed effect of this mysterious chemical? What is the point? How will affected people react that will benefit those that ordered the spraying to be done?

Who loads this chemical onto the aeroplane? What is the system that is used to deliver the spray into the atmosphere?

Commercial aircraft are flying for revenue. The enemy is weight. The heavier an aircraft is the more fuel it will burn. That is a fact. It is called ‘Physics’.

Those of us that have worked on aircraft for half a century are aware of the different systems on aeroplanes, some of us teach those systems to others.

The delivery system does not exist. The chemical does not exist. It, the chemical, would have to have a safety approval from IATA, ICAO, FAA, EASA, etc., before it can be carried on the aeroplane. Show me this certificate.

You can’t. It is hogwash.

Perhaps that is exactly what it is! We have uncovered the truth at last.

Commercial aircraft are spraying chemicals from thirty six thousand feet to clean the pig population.

It is hogwash!