Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I’m an idiot.

Most people are familiar with Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics but today I discovered he’s not the only science fiction writer creating laws in threes. Here are Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For more “laws”, some insightful, take a look here (scroll down past the blue boxes).

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness, it just buys you a more expensive set of problems.”

So says Marilyn Monroe.

I’d never seen a whole Marilyn Monroe film before but I watched The Seven Year Itch (famous for the scene pictured) a month or two ago and I was surprised to find that it was an old comedy that was actually still funny. In brief it’s about a guy who’s living and working in New York over the summer while his family are staying in the country when Marilyn moves in to the apartment above his. Temptation ensues!

Much of the film is monologues by the tormented man and it was actually his performance that kept my me watching. IMDB tells me that he performed the part 750 times on Broadway before the film was made and that he won the Tony (Oscars of theatre) award for his performance so I guess that’s why it stood out – he’d had a lot of time to perfect it.

I have a tendency to dismiss any film made before 1970 (not that I’ve seen many good films from the 70s, just that, in my mind, all films before that are war films or song and dance films with no story).