"OH MY GOD LOOK AT MY LEG" "He he he way to go jackass"

While reading I today I came across something that at face value seemed to be normal. It was a piece about how people with Glaswegian accents are more likely to be attractive to the Japanese. Fine. But then I started thinking, who would do that? I mean, who would think a good way to spend their time and taxpayer funds is to find out what sort of accent a Japanese person likes. It’s like spending £40,000 finding out if I like cheese. In the big scheme of things, it’s completely irrelevant.

But when you keep reading through it, you see so many more of these stupid surveys. Turns out that people who eat less than 80% their GDA of fat are more likely to pass an IQ test. How do you even find that out?

How was that even pitched? “Ok. I know due to government cuts we don’t have much money, and there’s all this important cancer research to do, but today we’re going to feed Johnny crap for a week and see if he becomes a dunce”. If I was there I would walk up to the idiot and slap him with a fish.

On the other hand of course, there are surveys that are useful and help the public. For example, falling rates of lung cancer. Apparently this is due to the smoking ban. But there is also a report saying that due to stress we are having less sleep. This leads to a 48% greater chance of heart disease and a 15% greater chance of a stroke. So, we stop smoking, and stress levels are on the rise. Funny that.

Of course these people like to make their obscure polls seem more significant by calling them “studies” and saying things like “The trend for late nights and early mornings is a ticking time bomb for our health”. Some also give their organisations (usually with main headquarters in their mother’s attic) silly four letter acronyms. For example, the centre for the investigation of language teaching is called CILT. Thumbs up if you misread the first time btw. Anyway they also have a column about how less and less students are taking languages. Which just proves they have their head in the sand because now we have the English baccalaureate, which states you need English, maths, two sciences, a humanities AND A LANGUAGE to get into A level. Effective next year if you’re panicking.

While I like I, I really have to put my foot down on the number of stupid studies they post. I saw one about the number of broken street lamps in a small country town nobodies ever heard of. All this, and proper news like the protests in Cairo is pushed to page 9.

I will say this for I though, on page three today they put a bit about a man killed by a chicken:

A man attending an illegal cockfight in central California died after being stabbed in the leg by his bird after he attached a knife to its leg. Jose Luis Ochoa, 35, was declared dead about two hours after he was stabbed.

The article was called “Way to Go”. Uncaring bastard irony Ftw.