MURPHY AT THE BAT.(The Talk of the Town)

It is one thing to be locked out of one's apartment, and to be forced to perform that cumbersome Manhattan ritual of window entry via fire escape. It is quite another to discover that there isn't any fire escape, and consequently, while impersonating Spider-Man, to slip and fall from five stories up, as one man on Cornelia Street did recently. His fall was broken, fortunately, by the awning of a restaurant below, and then, rather unfortunately, by the table at which two women were eating. Shards of glass lodged in the customers' hair, and although there appeared to be no serious injuries, all nearby diners were dismissed free of charge, thus depriving the restaurant of part of its haul on one of the last fine evenings of the alfresco season.

That unlikely event, reported in the Villager, occurred just a few days before a minor plumbing catastrophe over at the Times shut down most of its toilets. Nonetheless, the paper still managed to print an account, the next day, of a tractor-trailer collision on the Jersey Turnpike (Exit 3), which loosed hundreds of live chickens. The chickens' roadside wanderings, in turn, caused traffic to be diverted for three and a half hours. (Recently, the flow on the Turnpike has also been affected by spilled crabs, pasta, cake mix, and frozen turkeys.)

The pessimists and Red Sox fans among us will tend to shrug, and perhaps, when pressed, to mutter something about Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will. (Actually, the common formulation is a slight distortion of Ed Murphy's initial axiom, which stipulated, of an assistant, "If there is a wrong way to do it, he will," but whatever.) And it may be that they're right. A new study commissioned by British Gas goes so far as to demonstrate that Murphy's Law (or Sod's Law, as it's known in the U.K.) is not only a legitimate phenomenon but a measurable one.

As in: Let U, C, I, S, and F be integers between 1 and 9, reflecting, respectively, comparative levels of Urgency, Complexity, Importance, Skill, and Frequency in a given set of circumstances. Let A, which stands for Aggravation, equal 0.7. (Don't ask.) The likelihood, then, of Murphy's Law obtaining under those circumstances, on a scale of 0 to 8.6, would be: [((U + C + I) x (10 - S)) / 20] x A x 1 / (1 - sin (F / 10)). Easy.

The study, based on a survey of 1,023 mishaps, concludes, moreover, that the old corollary to Murphy's Law--that bad things happen at the most inopportune times--is statistically significant. As a ...