Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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Death Notes
Rational Fear is a splendid website which allows you to search a database of causes of death by age, sex and nationality in order to ascertain what you should really be scared of in this world. It throws up some enlightening results. For example, were I to die tomorrow, it would most likely be because I had hanged myself. My wife is perhaps more likely to die from epilepsy, but given that she’s not a heroin addict her next most likely immediate exit route is the same. It is pleasant to know that neither of us is likely to be rubbed out by a random axe murderer.
Some may find digging through these statistics a little ghoulish, but personally I find it fascinating. For example, if I were American, I would actually be much more likely to die violently by someone else’s hand, either by car or by gun. Were I Japanese or Swedish, I’d be lucky to die without killing myself. Of course, the basic message here is that if you are my age, you’re probably not going to get popped off the stack for a while, unless you’re really miserable, really unlucky or really daft. Again, this is pleasant, reassuring news.
The best thing about statistics, as any lazy hack knows, is that you can get them to say pretty much anything you want. Let’s see what happens if we cherry-pick some data: apparently males aged 10-14 are more likely to be killed by motorists than by any other cause. Now, given that more people buy The Sun and The Daily Mail than any other newspapers, and assuming that motorists read newspapers and reflect national newspaper demographics, we can conclude that the biggest identifiable group of killers of young boys is, in fact, Sun “readers”, closely followed by the wizened, soulless cohorts of the Daily Fail’s near-corpse army. Not paedophiles, immigrants, or Amy Winehouse. Gosh. What a surprise. Perhaps there should be some sort of register set up so we can go round and give these animals what for keep an eye on these sick individuals before one of them kills again.