This year our Ten Things series, on the tenth of each month, is concentrating on things which are wackier than usual, if not by much. From odd road names to Christmas carols by way of saints and scientists. So here goes with June …

Ten Humorous Laws

1. Hanlon’s Razor. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
2. Hofstadter’s Law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.
3. Mechanical Repair Law #3. If you take something apart and put it back together enough times, you will eventually have two of them.
4. Moer’s Truism. The trouble with most jobs is that the job holder resembles a member of a sled dog team. No one gets a change of scenery except the lead dog.
5. Mr Cole’s Axiom. The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.
6. Murphy’s Military Law #4. The most dangerous thing in the combat zone is an officer with a map. (right)
7. Natural Perversity Law. You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.
8. Ralph’s Observation. It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realise that you are in a hurry.
9. Rudin’s Law. If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will do it every time.
10. Stewart’s Law of Retroaction. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

We’re beginning every month this year with a haiku (or a longer poem made of haiku) relevant to the month.

All the poems can be found online at http://www.haikupoemsandpoets.com.

This year our Ten Things series, on the tenth of each month, is concentrating on things which are wackier than usual, if not by much. From odd road names to Christmas carols by way of saints and scientists. So here goes with May …

Ten Quotes

1. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
   As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
   To taste whole joys
   [John Donne, 1699] (right)
2. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
   [Benjamin Franklin]
3. My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
   [Indira Gandhi]
4. If you don’t concern yourself with your wife’s cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you.
   [Haruki Murakami; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle]
5. Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know?
   [Groucho Marx]
6. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
   [Caius Petronius]
7. In converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.
   [William Shakespeare]
8. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
   [George Bernard Shaw]
9. The key aspect that makes the Buddhist attitude toward sex utterly different is that the concept of sin does not exist in Buddhism.
   [Brad Warner; Sex, Sin and Zen] (also right)
10. No-one else is he and thus cannot deny that he knows when fish are happy.
    [Zhuang Zi]

We’re beginning every month this year with a haiku (or a longer poem made of haiku) relevant to the month.

All the poems can be found online at http://www.haikupoemsandpoets.com.

This year our Ten Things series, on the tenth of each month, is concentrating on things which are wackier than usual, if not by much. From odd road names to Christmas carols by way of saints and scientists. So here goes with April; and for Easter I thought we should have …

Ten 16th Century English Composers

1. William Byrd (born c.1540) (right)
2. Thomas Tallis (born c.1505)
3. Christopher Tye (born 1505)
4. Orlando Gibbons (born 1585)
5. Thomas Weelkes (born 1576)
6. John Wilbye (born 1574)
7. Peter Philips (born 1560)
8. Thomas Tomkins (born 1572)
9. John Shepperd (born 1515)
10. John Dowland (born 1563)

If you’re interested to know more, all have Wikipedia entries.

We’re beginning every month this year with a haiku (or a longer poem made of haiku) relevant to the month.

All the poems can be found online at http://www.haikupoemsandpoets.com.