Sod's Law

Feeble Bibles

2009-11-09T01:39:00.000-08:00

The Bible being one of the few books in which a printing error can imperil the immortal souls of millions of people, Sod’s law has paid its compositors particular attention over the years.
“I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing,” grumbled a 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, “the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.”
Most “unlearned” of all were undoubtedly the correctors on the so-called “Wicked Bible” of 1631, published by the royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas. What was intended to be a straightforward reprint of the King James version went critically wrong with the accidental omission of an important “not”. Exodus 20:14, therefore, told the faithful: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Missing out a word is one thing. But how the printers came to misspell the word “greatness” quite so badly in Deuteronomy 5:24 continues to beggar the imagination. “The Lord,” it announced, “hath shewed us his glory and his great arse.”
A furious Charles I ordered all copies recalled and burned (only 11 survive today), and the printers hauled before the Star Chamber. They were discouraged from continuing their publishing career.
A quarter-century later, another missing “not” gave encouragement to sinners, when a 1653 edition asked: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?” An edition in 1716 had Christ inviting his flock to “Go and sin on more.” A 1763 Bible told readers – another of those pesky missing negatives – “the fool hath said in his heart there is a God”.
Other editions have introduced a “Parable of the Vinegar” where the devout were expecting a vineyard, an additional miracle (“thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions”), an underwhelming Creation (“...the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was more sea”) and have wondered whether Gilead contains treacle.
Some mistakes are deliberate, however. Surely the misprint for “princes” in a pre-1700 edition of the Bible was the work of a disgruntled typesetter – Psalms 119:161: “Printers have persecuted me without cause.”

Altruism Fail, Pt One

2009-11-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

In 1995, Tom and Trixie Cummins of Austin, Texas decided to do something to help homeless people in their area after being reduced to tears by a local television report about a canned food drive.
“We’d had a few drinks and immediately started gathering most of the tins we had in the kitchen, drove them down to the depot, and handed them over. I’d forgotten all about it until yesterday, when we were getting ready for a toga party and Trixie asked me to get her diamond necklace,” he told reporters.
“I picked up the fake Campbell’s soup can where we keep our valuables and tried to open it. I couldn’t twist the top off, but at first I just thought it was rusty, so I used a can opener to open the lid. But inside there was only scotch broth.
“I remember saying to Trixie ‘I don’t feel too good,’ just before I passed out.”
Although the Campbell’s Soup company volunteered to match Mr Cummins’s offer of $2,500 as a reward for its return, the can full of jewellery was never recovered.
“One good deed and I’m over $70,000 out of pocket,” said Mr Cummins, who was cautioned by police for spray-painting the words “robbing cheating scum” on the front windows of his insurance company.

Where Is The Lake That Late We Had?

2009-11-04T07:13:00.000-08:00

Lake Peigneur was a pretty, ten-foot deep freshwater lake in Louisiania popular with fishermen from the surrounding area. A small island on the lake was given over to a pretty botanical garden, and the area was rich in natural mineral resources: deep underneath it were miles of tunnels given over to the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and across the surrounding landscape were dotted richly productive oil wells.
Early one November morning in 1980, twelve employees of Texaco petroleum, aboard an oil rig in the middle of the lake, were drilling an exploratory hole when their drilling rig suddenly seized up, more than 1,000 feet below the surface.
Try as they might, they couldn’t seem to free it. Suddenly, there came a series of ominous plops and belches from the muddy depths, and the rig listed over alarmingly. The oilmen weren’t sure what was going to happen, but decided that the safest place to watch it from was the shore.
As they reached shore, behind them the $5 million rig turned turtle and vanished beneath the surface of the lake – a lake that was supposed to be only ten feet deep. Moments later, where the rig had been, the water started to turn. A whirlpool formed.
Texaco, as it turned out, had miscalculated the position of the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and drilled a 14” hole in the top of one of the main shafts. The water rushed into the salt dome, dissolving the salt and steadily enlarging the hole as it went.
As if the plug had been pulled out of a ten-square-mile bathtub – the entire contents of the lake started to disappear into the mines.
As miners scrambled to evacuate the salt mines and the oilmen watched the carnage, gobsmacked, from the shore, one local fisherman steered his boat to shore, tied it to a tree and leaped out -- only to watch boat and tree both vanish into the whirlpool. Pockets of compressed air in the salt-mines exploded into 400ft geysers.
The whirlpool also swallowed another drilling platform, a barge loading dock, five houses, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, most of the botanical gardens, trucks, trees, a motor home and a parking lot. So powerful was the suction that it reversed the flow of a canal leading from the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 164-foot waterfall (the tallest – temporarily -- in the state of Louisiana) and sucking 11 barges and a manned tugboat into the salt mines.
Two days later, nine of the barges popped back up to the surface like corks.
Nobody was hurt.

Armed Robbery Fail

2009-11-03T03:11:00.001-08:00

At around teatime on 3rd February 1990, David Zaback strolled into a crowded shop in Washington State in the North-West of the United States. He pulled out a .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol, announced that this was a robbery and that he’d shoot dead anybody who didn’t put their hands on the counter and keep them there.
His instructions were disregarded. Several of the customers, a shop assistant and a policeman immediately drew guns and invited him to make their day -- which he promptly did.
The mistake he made, as he would have had cause to reflect afterwards had he not been lying dead with three bullets in the chest and one in his arm, was that the shop he chose to try and rob was called “H & J Leather and Firearms Limited”. The clue was in the name.
Actually, that wasn’t his only mistake. His other mistake was deciding to rob the shop while Timothy Lally, a policeman with 18 years experience on the force, was leaning up against the counter having a coffee and shooting the breeze with owner of the gun-shop. Mr Lally was in uniform at the time.
“The surprising thing,” Police Captain Don Persson told reporters afterwards, “is that the man had to walk right past a marked police car to get in the front door.”

Mmmm.... Doughnuts!

2009-11-03T03:04:00.000-08:00

In 2002, two enterprising pranksters spotted a Krispy Kreme doughnut truck idling in the parking lot of a Louisiana convenience store. While the driver was inside making his delivery, they hijacked the truck and roared off in the direction of the nearby town of Lacombe, rubbing their tummies like Yogi Bear in receipt of a pickernick basket.
They were disconcerted, said 31-year-old Rose Houk – who bashfully admitted that they’d been smoking crack “for hours” before the incident – when the police caught up with them. They had not realised that the rear doors of the truck were open throughout their getaway, and they had left a 15-mile-long trail of doughnuts along the highway.

Jade-Like Girls Go MaxPlanck Crazy

2009-11-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

In the autumn of 2008, the editors of MaxPlanckForschung, the journal of the Max Planck Institute, one of Germany’s most prestigious research bodies, published a special issue dedicated to China. They asked one of their journalists to find “an elegant Chinese poem” to adorn the cover, and he duly came up with five columns of pretty-looking kanji pictograms, which they printed in elegant white on red.
Only when the issue fell into the hands of native Chinese speakers did it become clear that something had gone wrong. The literal translation of the “poem” was as follows:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées
KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,
Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,
Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;
Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

“It is not my intention to provide a complete explication de texte,” wrote linguistics blogger Victor Mair in a thoughtful postmortem. It appeared, he was prepared to venture though, to be an advertisement for some form of adult entertainment.
“Regardless of how we interpret the quadripartite character,” Mair mused, “we can tell from context that it indicates the two individuals who are in charge of the girls in the show. Clearly this is an advertisement for some kind of burlesque business. I did find quite a few references on the Web to a “KK Juggy” from a group called “Machine Gun Fellatio”, and apparently the KK in her name stands for “Knickers” and “Knockers.” Perhaps KK in the sense of “Knickers and Knockers” is an Australian expression, since KK Juggy (Christa Hughes) is from Sydney.”
And there, perhaps, the mystery is best left.

Hello Cleveland!

2009-10-31T03:05:00.000-07:00

It is courtesy of the unrivalled gossip site Popbitch that I became aware of the misfortune that befell Richi Abarca, singer in the Mexican teen band Magneto, a few years back.
Magneto had arrived in Guatemala City by helicopter, and were met at the airport by hordes of fans. As Richi stepped off the helicopter he raised his hands to greet the crowd. Unfortunately – Richi being only 16 years old, and dumb as a stump, the rotor blades were still going round.
Three of his fingers were found, spread out over a 100m radius. His index and middle fingers were reattached and are making a full recovery, though the restoration of his little finger proved only a partial success. Richi’s ring finger is still missing.

F***ed in a Hearse, Both Ways

2009-10-30T04:01:00.001-07:00

On a sultry afternoon in 1999, 23-year-old undertaker's apprentice Jose Noh borrowed the hearse from work, drove it into a Mexico City warehouse, and sneaked his sweetheart into the back to make love. Afterwards they drifted off in each-other's arms.
They were later found dead in the back of the coffin-wagon, in a warehouse filled with carbon monoxide. Jose had left the motor running so they could keep the air-conditioning on.

Blaze of Publicity -- Splutter, Phut

2009-10-30T03:30:00.001-07:00

So: how's it all going? I expect that's what you're wondering. It's what I'd be wondering if I was this blog's only reader, which I am.

A searching and fearless moral inventory of my efforts to publicise my book...

The idea of starting a blog seemed to be a good one. I'd post a story from the book every day, Twitter and Facebook and retweet and all that jazz, and word would spread virally, Sod's Law would become a groovy mini-cult, and I'd rocket up Amazon.

Well, I've been dutifully posting a story a day.

Result: Comments on blog: 0. Retweets by me: about 10. Retweets by anyone else: 1. Susan Hills irritated: 1

Then I watched back the Alan Titchmarsh show. Having been, obviously, petrified, I came away from filming rather pleased. I hadn't wet myself on air, or bitten anyone's ear off, or burst into tears. I had even made a joke that got a laugh. So my hopes were high. I'd nailed it!

Why, oh why, did I Sky Plus it? There was this *creature* -- looking like he'd been kept in a cellar for six months and fed Spam through a tube, then rolled in flour, whining about losing his job (a year ago!) and making inane remarks about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Good GOD. That was me.

Still, perhaps that was okay after all. The book was on display. Then, my mum: "Shame about that, darling, wasn't it? Nobody's going to have the faintest idea the book's supposed to be funny, are they? They'll think it's just some long self-helpy whinge."

I logged onto Amazon as the AT show ended. Score! I'd gone 100 places DOWN in the Amazon rankings. It had reminded people to log on and cancel their pre-orders.

But all not lost. I was on an Irish radio programme last night. It went like this.

"Okay, he's just in a song. In about a minute he'll go to you."

*waits, remembers to breathe*

*song ends*

Presenter: "And now we have..."

*other song starts*

Presenter: "... the sound of Sharon Corr..."

*sad face*

Presenter: "... Oi've made a bollix of it. Pressed completely the wrong button. Ha ha! Sod's Law!"

Anyway, they had me on after Sharon Corr so all was not lost. I'm now 100 more places further down the Amazon listings. One more big push and I can get out of the top 1000, I reckon.

In Your Face, W B Yeats!

2009-10-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

In December 1932, W B Yeats was a guest at a dinner in Wellesley College in Massachusetts. As evening wound on, Yeats fell into an involving conversation about poetry with his next-door neighbour. It was late in the meal before he realised he'd addressed not a word to the fellow on his other side.
"My friend and I," he said jovially, "have been discussing the defects of T S Eliot's poetry. What do you think of the poetry?"
The man pursed his lips slightly, and wordlessly held up his place card for Yeats to read.
It said: "T S Eliot."

Ireland's Worst Driver

2009-10-28T03:08:00.000-07:00

In June 2007, the Irish police force finally caught up with Prawo Jazdy, a reckless driver who racked up more than 50 motoring offences across the Republic. In each case, Mr Jazdy had given the arresting officers a false address and absconded without paying a fine.
“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for ‘driving licence’ and not the first and surname on the licence,” wrote the explanatory letter circulated by an officer working in the Garda’s traffic division.
“Having noticed this, I decided to check and see how many times officers have made this mistake. It is quite embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.”

Jinkies. The Daily Star.

2009-10-27T03:21:00.000-07:00

http://bit.ly/SodInTheDailyStar
Video Vixens highly recommended also.

Worst. Submarines. Ever.

2009-10-27T01:38:00.000-07:00

Britain’s answer to the German U-Boat were the K-Class submarines – 100-metre-long steam-powered submersibles that cost £340,000 a pop, and could do 24 knots on the surface. Minor design faults aside – travelling at speed could cause the front of the boat to plunge under the surface of the water, and big waves tended to pour down the funnels and put the boilers out – they were the pride of the fleet.
They saw heroic action in the First World War, and our seafaring nation is able to boast that not one was ever lost through enemy action. Six of the 18 built, however, sank by accident.
K1 crashed into K4 off the coast of Denmark and had to be scuttled.
K2 caught fire on her maiden dive. In 1924, she collided with K12 as they were leaving Portland harbour.
K3 plunged nose-first to the bottom in December 1916 (giving a thrill of patriotic pride, no doubt, to the future King George VI who happened to be on board at the time), got stuck in mud and took 20 minutes to free. The following January her boiler room flooded in the North sea. The year after that she again dived unexpectedly and crashed into the sea-bed, causing massive damage to her hull.
K4, having survived the collision that did for K1, was less lucky in the sarcastically-named “Battle of May Island”, the debacle that outright did for two of the K-class submarines, seriously damaged four more of them as well as dinging a couple of battlecruisers.
It was the last night of January, 1918, when a flotilla of around 40 vessels passed through the mouth of the Firth of Forth en route to exercises in Scapa Flow. The trouble started when the flotilla changed direction and K22 crashed into K14. Then the battlecruiser Inflexible crashed into K22 (Inflexible lived up to her name, but K22 bent round at right angles and sunk till only the conning tower could be seen above the surface of the water).
Fearless crashed into K17, which went straight to the bottom. Then, as the submarines behind took lumbering evasive action, things got worse. While attempting to avoid colliding with K3, K4 was nearly cut in half by K6 and then rammed by K7 before heading, too, with grim inevitability for the seabed.
K5 was not involved in the Battle of May Island. She went down with all hands for no apparent reason during exercises in the Bay of Biscay.
K10 foundered while being towed in 1922.
K13 sank during sea-trials in a Scottish loch when her hatches failed to shut properly on diving. Salvaged and recommissioned as K22, she would go on to take a distinguished role in the Battle of May Island.
K15 – anxious to cut to the chase – spontaneously sank at her mooring in Portsmouth Harbour in 1921.
Only one K-boat ever engaged the enemy. It hit a U-boat amidships with a torpedo. The torpedo failed to explode.

Fail in the Wales

2009-10-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

Well, that went well. Kind of. Ish. Actually, who am I kidding? It was a catastrophe.

I just got up and did Good Morning Wales. All that I needed to do, I thought, was let my natural charisma shine through.

I did. It did. Unfortunately.

Was it the awkward silence after I told the story about the poor fish-seller who lost her life savings when her house burned down? Or was it the gulfing, baffled pause -- five full seconds of dead air -- after I abbreviated my favourite parable: "There's an optimist and a pessimist, right? They're washed up together on a desert island. And they both starve to death."

"Ah, yes. Thank you. That was, er, Sam Leith. And now to the news headlines..."

I need to try to be a bit more heartwarming, I think.

Oh, and

2009-10-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

we're in the Daily Mail today:

http://bit.ly/SodintheMail

So if we get as many hits as Jan Moir we'll be laughing, kinda.

Lucky Escape From Frying Pan

2009-10-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

It was August 6th. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese engineer who worked designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi, rose early. He had spent three months working at his firm’s shipyard 180 miles from home, and was looking forward to getting home to see his family. He and two colleagues collected their belongings and set out from their lodgings to catch the train west.
As they went, though, he remembered he had left something in the office, so waved them off and set off to retrieve it. He remembers hearing the buzz of an aeroplane’s engines circling overhead, just after 8:15 am. He thought nothing of it.
The year was 1945, the city Mr Yamaguchi had been working in was Hiroshima – and the aeroplane circling overhead was the Enola Gay.
Mr Yamaguchi was less than two miles from ground zero when “Little Boy” exploded in the air 580 metres up. There was a blinding flash of light and a deafening bang. Mr Yamaguchi was knocked off his feet by the force of the blast, and his skin burnt. He had no idea what had just happened. Somehow, he found his way to an air-raid shelter, where he spent the night.
The following day, he stumbled through the wreckage of Hiroshima, swaddled in bandages, to get the train back to his home town.
Trouper that he was, and still badly burned, Mr Yamaguchi nevertheless reported for work the following morning.
On the morning of his second day back at work, he was just in the middle of telling his boss what had happened in Hiroshima (his boss was incredulous, he said, at the idea that a single bomb could destroy an entire city) when once again there was a blinding flash of light, a deafening bang, and Mr Yamaguchi was knocked flat by a burning blast of heat.
His home town was, of course, Nagasaki – and Mr Yamaguchi was once again at ground zero.
140,000 civilians are estimated to have died as a result of America’s attack on Hiroshima – either instantly, or from the after-effects of radiation. The death toll in Nagasaki was 70,000.
Mr Yamaguchi, interviewed in March 2009 at the age of 93, reported that he was in good health but “a little deaf in one ear”.

Pineapple Bashed By Swedes

2009-10-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

In April 2009, the Japanese pop star Hideki Kaji was beaten up by Swedes while dressed as a pineapple. Mr Kaji, 41, was shooting a music video in Malmo when he volunteered to guard the camera equipment while his crew sloped off for a break. Three muggers busted his lip, knocked loose a filling, and made off with 20,000 kronor’s worth of equipment, leaving Mr Kaji unconscious and with his street-cred in tatters. Mr Kaji’s hits include “My Favourite Tofflor”, “Suddenly Sibylla” and “Ramlösa”.

Beer Promotion Fail

2009-10-24T02:29:00.000-07:00

In 1996, the beer company Molson staged a series of rock concerts in order to raise the profile of its brand. The results were mixed. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden announced to the crowd: “We’re here because of some beer company… LABATT’S!”
Courtney Love got the name of the beer right. “God bless Molson,” she said. “I douche with it every day.”

Pinhead Party Trick

2009-10-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

An academic paper entitled “A Case of Fatal Suffocation During An Attempt To Swallow A Pool Ball” tells the story of a 23-year-old Edinburgh man whose party trick in the pub was to appear to swallow balls from the pool table to impress his mates.
The trick to this is to hold the pool ball in the back of your throat, nestled neatly against your pharynx. A standard pool ball – 503 mm in diameter – was just the right size for our man to do that.
On this particular night, his hand alighted on the cue-ball – which being slightly smaller at 475mm across was just the right size to slot neatly into the back of his throat and lodge there snugly, cutting off his air supply.
He turned blue, collapsed and died outside the pub. The man was described by police as “of low intelligence”.

Meanwhile, to avoid you having to actually

2009-10-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

buy it -- that's part of the new internet business model, see, where you make something and then give it away for free -- I'm just about to post today's classic disaster.

There'll be more to follow every day, my chickadees. Print them all out, and eventually they'll build up to a cherished collection of printed-out bits of paper you can staple together and treasure.

God. Imagine.

The Book!

2009-10-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

And here it is! 166 pages of desultory chuckles followed by a lingering sense of ennui and the realisation that someone else needs to use the loo.Note that the subtitle of the book is one thing on the cover and another on the Amazon description. And ...neither of them even makes sense. Whose life is *buttered*? Does life have sides? I don't know why I bother. Really I don't.

http://bit.ly/sodslawbook

2009-09-14T04:59:00.001-07:00

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