Already we are burdened with worrying about global poverty, the spread of AIDS and malaria in Africa, WWIII starting in the Middle-East, water shortages, rising fuel prices, fundamental inequalities of opportunity in education leading to more general inequalities in society, and a million other things, so yet one more thing to worry about is far from welcome, but I have found something…
That Tyranny of Numbers book has all sorts of odd statistics and obscure units of measurement sprinkled through it to break up the prose. One of the statistics is that the average person will, during their lifetime, accidentally swallow 8 spiders during their sleep.
Obviously my first reaction was to give up sleeping, but after a few days hallucinations set in so I now sleep with an extra-large band-aid across my mouth. I suspect that Stephen Milligan had come across the same statistic but got carried away with the anti-spider ingestion measures which were sadly misinterpreted after his death.
The trouble is that I can’t read that statistic without imagining them as the 3-inch across black hairy creatures like George who lives in the corner of our living room. I know logically they are more likely to be mini-money spiders but even so…
You can’t tell me stuff like that! Now I’m going to have to swallow a bird.