STASTISSICS

As I was plucking my eyebrows with my cool new red Tweezerman tweezers, the TV was droning in the background. Two gentlemen were arguing about the stock market, imagine that. Man A, Stockbroker, claimed that he had studied the stock market in incredible detail and had devised charts and formulas to accurately predict the rise and fall of the markets. He claimed that his company, for the last three years, had been able to outperform the market consistently. Man B, Statistician, claimed that Man A was full of hoo hah, and that the market by nature would have ups-and-downs no more predictable than the flip of a coin, and that to follow Man A's advice would be to seriously risk the toileting of your money.

Sometimes I think television was really only devised for argument. I put my tweezers down, and held my hands in a Point/Counterpoint pose.

BLAH BLAH BLAH, snapped Left Hand to Right Hand

WELL, BLAH BLAH BLAH, sniped Right Hand To Left Hand.

The female narrator of the television program, as I finished my very brief one-act Hand Play, caught my ear with this:

"In anything, if you look long enough, you can find justification in statistics."

Ain't that the truth. What cannot be manufactured as truth in the comforting logical guise of numbers? HEY, you can't argue with them! Numbers are non-subjective! Indeed. Not so for the people who manipulate them, though.

It kind of reminds me of being in my Abnormal Psych class in college. As the professor went the through all the major diagnoses, you could see the faces of the students drop here and there, thinking, WHOA! THAT ME SHE TALK 'BOUT! Well, no, in reality probably Cutie Pie Freshman Girl was not a schizophrenic and Inexplicable Rugby Scholarship Boy was not a bipolar with compound issues of OCD, ODD, ADD, BPD, NPD, and halitosis.

My point is, go looking for trouble long enough and you will surely find it. My counterpoint is, go looking for rationalizations long enough, and you will find those too. Numbers are natural, but also a concept made by man to squeeze information into patterns that may or may not be exactly truthful. God is a concept by which we measure our pain. I didn't make that last one up up, John Lennon did.

The intentional misspelling of the title of this essay is in reference to the fact that for the life of me, I cannot pronounce the word, "statistics."