Only a few more hours and I will once again have an air conditioner. I’ll be able to open my shades during the day so my plants aren’t drooping with indoor depression and my cats will lose that wild-eyed, shut-in look. It stands to reason, once I have the AC installed, the summer heat will wane and I’ll be able to open the windows again. At the very least, this will give me the means to can tomatoes at the end of the summer without dissolving into a once-was-human puddle.

Entirely off topic, I was distracted momentarily by looking up the explanation for Murphy’s Law, for which I’ve heard many claims to earlier uses. Adages do tend to pop up more than once over time. They are intended as truisms after all. Anyway, while looking it up, I encountered a List of Eponymous Laws which sounded too entertaining to be dismissed. Many of the laws are scientific, but there are a few that fall into the realm of commentary on human nature. A couple favorites (some I knew, some I learned):

• Hanlon’s Razor – “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity,” also stated as, “Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence.”
• Finagle’s Law - Hanlon’s Razor is often connected to Finagle’s Law, coined by  John W. Campbell, Jr. and popularized by Larry Niven. My favorite form of the law is the description of the belief it sets forth, also known as Resistentialism: “Inanimate objects are out to get us.” Given my overall clumsiness, I am all for placing the blame squarely on the objects and not myself.
• Hofstadter’s law – “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979).
• Muphry’s Law – “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” The editorial equivalent of Murphy’s Law and as such, a purposeful misspelling of the name.
• Orgel’s Second Rule – “Evolution is cleverer than you are,” from a set of rules attributed to the evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel and the one I would have printed on a tee shirt.

And now I should probably go make a donation to Wikipedia since every link in the post takes you to the site.