I love Laws. Not law Laws, that the Police moan about if you break. I hate most of those. I mean Laws like Murphy's Law or Parkinson's Law, and before I die I hope to have one named after me. I am extremely proud of Micklethwait's Law of Negotiated Misery, and will go on saying this until others take up the mantra and save me the bother. Micklethwait's Law of Negotiated Misery is true. It explains something very important about the world, which is why so many people are so miserable all the time, despite rising living standards, DVDs, etc. It is blackly humorous, which is very important for these Laws, and it is in general a most excellent Law which I commend to you with pride and enthusiasm.

Here is another.

Re my friend who was complaining at the end of the previous posting here today about the quality of her education, she now strikes me as a fine example of Micklethwait's Law of Educational Complaint, which says that the better educated a person is and the better they subsequently do in life, the more loudly they complain about their early education. My two favourite examples are Einstein, who moaned all his life about the blundering fool who first taught him science, and Yehudi Menuhin, who still rages about the man who first taught him violin.

But I would reckon those those those two long-dead pedagogues did, you know, okay. I mean, science to Einstein? Violin to Menuhin? They must have been doing something right.

In contrast, all the people you meet who seem utterly convinced that their education was wholly excellent seem, as a general rule, to be completely useless human beings, good for nothing except droning on about how their schooldays were the happiest days of their lives, despite the fact that they were beaten senseless by their teachers, sexually molested by their fellow pupils, made to do completely stupid things in vile weather or hideously drafty and dirty classrooms, etc. etc., none of which "ever did us any harm", etc. etc.