Urban pukeko 1

Today I ran across a pukeko* which walked almost like a duck. Living among ducks, it may have considered itself, if pukekos consider such things, as a duck.

*A pukeko is a New Zealand native bird that slightly resembles a blue chicken.

I was reminded of an Italian proverb which goes: “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck.”

This in turn set me reflecting that proverbs sometimes inspire people to rephrase or reword them.

Douglas Adams reckoned that, “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

The proverb, “The early bird catches the worm,” inspired Norman Ralph Augustine to suggest that, “The early bird gets the worm. The early worm... gets eaten.”

Fools rush in… or… Better to get up late and be wide awake than to get up early and be dead all day.

A popular aphorist, Murphy (if he were a bloggist what would HIS readership be?), is credited with many sayings usually related to the inevitability of bad luck. Many people are adding to the collection of Murphy’s Laws and others are augmenting them by way of corollaries, observations, revisions, etc.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy.

O’Toole’s comment: Murphy was an optimist.

A bit of advice for tomorrow: Eat one live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.