But did you know that Nury Vittachi’s children are Olympic hopefuls?
A colleague asked me to be her baby’s godparent but her smile faded as she watched me trying to operate a microwave. Ouch. There’s obviously a hidden law which says All Microwave Ovens Must Be Impossible to Turn On in a Different Way.
Hidden laws are troublesome. For example: city administrators in Hengshui, a city in the Hebei province of China, recently passed an official law forcing all taxi drivers to switch to electric vehicles – forgetting that there is an unofficial but natural law in China saying that communities which only recently moved from bicycles to petrol vehicles have no electric car charging stations.
A reader from the United States reports that a new law in Arizona made it illegal for any adult to touch the private parts of anyone under 15. This sounded wise until residents realised that all the babies in the state now have to change their own nappies and give themselves baths, or their parents can be arrested.
The legal sector needs to copy the system used by tech people, having a “beta” period where new laws are tried out. The official objection to this is that social engineering is evil.
I dispute this, since a great many of us already do social experiments on human beings, a technique known as “parenting”. For example, since the Olympics, I have encouragingly referred to my children as “Olympic hopefuls”, a phrase much used on TV. They are useless at sport, but there’s no law against using being hopeful, right?
The advantage of having a testing period is that we could try out much-needed laws which might be controversial. Case in point: There clearly needs to be a law saying that once a year, all singers need to sing in public WITHOUT AUTOTUNE. This would lead to the tragic ends of the careers of Britney Spears, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Kesha, T-Pain, One Direction, etc. It would also mean that my children would stop talking to me. Good news upon good news.
Before I had kids, my favourite game was
“rock paper scissors”.
This is because, as a writer, I loved the fact that this game recognised that paper should actually be classified as a powerful weapon. But now I have kids and they beat me every time, as the game shamefully penalises people who are loyal to any particular commodity.
By the way, did I mention my kids are Olympic hopefuls?
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