Statistics

Statistics

Statistics, from a Yahoo story:

Nose picking appears to be a habit that, although it usually begins in childhood, may actually linger into adulthood. If you find that hard to believe, consider that a 1995 study of adults found that 91% picked their noses on a regular basis - and about 8% of those people reported that they eat what they pick!

How many adults are there in America? 250 mil? For Argument's sake?

Which means there are 227.5 million adults who pick their nose.

Eight percent of that, as the story says, Eat what they Find. Now maybe you're more mature than I am, but when I read that line, my mind says "Holy. Shit."

Anyway, doing the math, that puts the number somewhere around 18 million adults in America, right?

Which means you have space in that number to include everybody from the state of Alabama (population 4.5 mil), with plenty of room left over for every White Sox fan everywhere

Tommy? Yeah, he picks. From time to time. Usually in the bathroom, where he's got toilet paper to wipe what he finds. But he's been known to go mining out of the toilet, up one nostril or the other to open up a blockage, or perhaps to silence a dreaded "whistler."

Which reminds me of a joke:

Why do Gorillas have such big nostrils?

Because they have such big fingers.

Another one...one I haven't thought of in a long time and it is tangentially related to our discussion.

How do you get 19 Alabamans into a volkswagon?

Put a booger on the dashboard.

Yeah. Not funny now, maybe. But a riot when you're in the fourth grade.

Neither here nor there, but also funny back in the day?

Where did Christa McAuliffe go for her vacation?

All over Florida.

But I digress.

I'd like to include a link to Wikipedia's section on Nose-Picking, which I found highly informative. I can't wait to whip the word "rhinotillexomania" at somebody. That's a word I'd like to see at the next year's National Spelling Bee. I'd especially like to see it used in a sentence.

Also, the entry says this:

Mucophagy, the consumption of the mucus...extracted [from the nose], while common in some cultures, is a much greater taboo. So much so, that even those who engage in the practice generally find it disgusting when done by someone else in their presence, much like flatulence.

Let me say this:

I was roommates with the Evil Hippy for a good long time. And let me tell you something about the boy. He can fart like nobody's business. Seriously. The boy ain't right. I would never enter willingly into a flatulence contest with him, because it'd be like taking a pen knife into a sword fight. I'd maybe get one good cutter off, and then I'd be nuked into oblivion.

My point here is that farting? In the scheme of things, I don't really have a problem. I do, if you're a stranger and it's the middle of K-Mart. But generally speaking, farts are funny.

But were the Hippy (or anybody, for that matter) to have whipped out a little mucophagy in the middle of a fart war, that'd have been dirty, dirty pool. It's a semantic issue, but I personally find the practice of eating what you find Much, Much more disgusting than flatulence. So much so that I capitalized Much. Twice, even.

That's merely personal preference.

Anyway. I just want to close with the old saying cited in the Wikipedia entry...You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friend's nose."

Unless they ask you.