The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Bullsh*t Statistics
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#3.
Spousal Abuse Skyrockets on Super Bowl Sunday
Surely watching the manliest of sports play out on the world stage brings out the redneck in all of us. It isn't too hard to imagine that a shitty husband or boyfriend might do something like this on Superbowl Sunday. "Woman! Get me a beer! *smack*" "Woman! Turn up the TV! I'm watching the Supabowl! *smack*" "Woman! I don't wanna see you again for the next 2 hours unless you're nekked! *smack*" And who hasn't been to a Super Bowl Party where one of the male guests gets into a fistfight with his wife in front of all their closest friends? What's that you say common sense? Pretty much everybody hasn't been to a party like that? Why Is It a Load of Crap? The problem with this statistic is that the kind of men who would hit their wives and girlfriends over something on TV are the kind of men who are already doing it anyway. In reality, there is no solid evidence that suggests spouses are abused on Super Bowl Sunday, and in fact for some men the distraction of football might actually make them less likely to hit their wives. Who Started It?
Who Was Fooled? It becamse a big enough deal that NBC aired a public service announcement warning about the dangers of spousal abuse before the game. We hate to think how many abusive husbands, having settled in to watch football, saw the ad and thought, "Hey, that reminds me! I've been so preoccupied with the game that I haven't abused my wife today! Thanks, NBC!" #2.
You Must Wait 30 Minutes After Eating Before Swimming
If at any time in your life you've had food in your hand near a swimming pool, you've heard this myth. You cannot swim until you've waited at least 30 minutes. For some families, the more harsh "hour" rule was used. If you broke the rule, the implication was that you would get cramps, be unable to swim, drown, and die. This rule seemed to apply even if you stayed on the shallow end. According to this statistic, unlike air, water-to-skin contact has magical properties that cause the food in your belly to explode unless it is past a certain point in your digestive track. Why Is It a Load of Crap?
In fact, the movement of your body in the water, particularly if you are just a little kid with floaties on, is more restricted than that of a typical walk. Granted, if you were to swim rigorously for exercise, you wouldn't want to jump in the pool and start swimming lines right after a big bowl of Chili unless your goal is to chum for some sharks with your mouth. Who Started It? This one actually comes from an old wives tale that slowly became popular over the years. Supposedly, your stomach is using oxygen to digest food that your muscles need to swim. In actuality, the amount of oxygen your body needs to swim is more than satisfied, whether or not you've eaten recently. Who Was Fooled? This cutesy little kids site is one of many offering swimming tips that still buys into the old "wait 30 minutes" rule. These lies aren't without their consequences. What happens when they find out the 30 minute statistic is false. Doesn't that suggest that the other stuff on the page must be false, too? A horseplay revolution could arise, complete with much more serous acts of rebellions like kids diving in the shallow end, swimming during electrical storms and thinking they could stay under water longer by biting fart bubbles.
#1.
Christmas Causes Suicide
Christmas: A season of joy and togetherness and shopping and joy and shopping. It might be true that Christmas has become really commercialized (as you might have heard from Charlie Brown once or twice), but people generally seem to enjoy it. Aside from the stress, and family you hate, the travel and the junk lying around the house, of course. And the music. Actually, when we hear that suicide rates jump during the holidays, it's easy to believe it. Especially if you've ever spent a Christmas drunk and alone, tearing up as you sit in your apartment and watch your favorite Christmas movie from childhood (Die Hard). Why Is It a Load of Crap? Actually, the suicide rate goes down significantly. Why? While it's depressing as hell to be alone on Christmas, the truth is most of us aren't. It's just hard to commit suicide when there's people around constantly trying to get you to wear ugly sweaters. Depressed or not, most people aren't big enough dicks to let the kiddies find them hanging over the Christmas tree with a note pinned to their chest.
Who Started It? In this case, no one fooled us more than ourselves. It's what they call confirmation bias; we decide ahead of time that people should get depressed over the holidays, so when we hear somebody killed themselves on Christmas, we assume the holiday was the reason. Never mind that far more people kill themselves on President's day, and most other lesser holidays. Never mind that there could have been a thousand other reasons to be depressed. Who Was Fooled?
But also, just about every newspaper in the country tends to climb on board. Studies indicate that newspapers actually emphasize suicides during the holidays over the rest of the year, again assuming a link between the suicide and the holiday when they didn't even know if the victim recognized that it was the holiday at all. In the general population, whether or not you believe this stat tends to depend on how much you hate Christmas (see this typical response from a ray of sunshine talking about how it's "no wonder" suicide rates go up that time of year). For some reason, when we're miserable we like to project it on other people, and assume they're all miserable too. And, if thinking that other people are suicidal makes you feel a little less suicidal yourself, then go for it. If you enjoyed that, you might like our rundown of 9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think. Or head to the brand new Official Cracked.com Store and become a startlingly attractive walking advertisement for our site. And be sure to get the Cracked Hit List delivered in your electronic mailbox every Thursday. And be even surer to find out where the inspiration for porn comes from. |
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This myth reached its peak in 1993, when a series of battered women's advocates came forward claiming abuse hotline calls went up by as much as 40% on the day of the big game. Similar stats got repeated and inflated endlessly in the lead up to the Super Bowl, when every section of the paper is obligated to have a story about the Super Bowl, even if there's absolutely nothing to report. Oh newspapers, how we'll miss your journalistic integrity.
Because you're not a Gremlin. As you may have already guessed, water does not, in fact, bear properties that form a cramp of death, should you get in the water after eating. Getting into the water after eating will have no more effect on your body than going for a walk. 
The movie Gremlins, for one. A character quotes the suicide stat, which is one of several scientific inaccuracies we noticed in that film (see swimming after eating). 
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Here is another one for the list: "Women make better drivers."
While the actual number of crashes involving women drivers vs. male drivers is lower, men drive a lot more mileage than women do. This ratio is further inflated in the larger trucks and vans, where there are about 500 male drivers to every 1 female driver or more, and yet a big rig or other large truck being driven by a female is far more likely to be involved in a wreck of some kind, and not neccessarily with other cars and trucks.
I have not come across any numbers on this, however; the majority of accidents where the driver of the truck / bus that has gotten hung up on railroad tracks (especially in areas where signs forbid large trucks from using certain crossings), and/or accidents where the driver has pulled part of the truck across the tracks, but not all the way and the truck got hit by the train are driven predominantly by women.
A good example of this is the 1995 train and bus crash in Fox River Grove, Ill. The driver was unfamiliar with both the route, and with the actual size of the bus that she drove. She left the tail end of the bus across the tracks, and 7 children ended up dying because of it.
I would have to find what year it was, but there was another similar wreck with a female bus driver that got lost and stopped her bus on a double track mainline, while she pulled out a map. The driver was one of the few survivors.
I have been driving for the past 12 years, and have never been in an accident that was my fault, and yet I have been involved in 4 collisions, and a hit and run, all involved a woman driver. (All have been in CT, so that may be part of the problem)
For example in 2006: a woman in a black Jeep Wrangler ran a stop light and nailed my F-150 head-on while I was turning (I had the green light.)
My mother was a terrible driver, she averaged 2 at fault accidents a year from 1989 to 1998. In 1994 she pulled off 3 at fault collisions in TWO WEEKS! One with her car and the other two in rentals that she was driving while her 1985 Pontiac 6000 was being repaired.
And men pay more for insurance, why?
"So the part of your brain you're using to read this article is not the same part you'll be using tonight when you get drunk and fight a hobo."
It's like you're clairvoyent
http://waywrong.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/myth-the-average-person-swallows-8-spiders-every-year/
Im not sure if the Lisa Holt story is true...
I probably believe the every seven seconds cos altogether it's approx 3 1/2 hours a day.
2 hrs surfing for porn (at least!), various thoughts popping up during the day about random women and co-workers, half an hour with a playboy/underwear catalogue and a good porn movie.
So if you did it all in blocks it might average out at one second for every 7... but I'm not sure how many men can only think about sex for one second!
totally going to go and watch gremlins now
I really can't believe that anybody believe that men think about sex every 6 seconds. At least half the population should be able to call shenanigans with no trouble, and the other half should just, I dunno, not be retarded (or use their intuition or whatever)
It's WINTER. More people die during the cold dreary months. These are not suicides but old folks just deciding to exercises their last great gesture to the world: f**k it, I'm outta here!
Everything becomes commercialized around the holidays. If anybody were to actually look up suicide statistics or happen to be an EMT or police officer or etcetera, you'd know that even the way people kill themselves differs between man and woman. Women prefer "clean" suicides where there is not a mess (seen highly amongst housewives) while men will usually want their death to be something that, in their minds, is "a man's death." They will go to places of sentimental value or places of natural beauty and are more likely to shoot or hang themselves rather than doing methods that are less painful.
"a spinning kaleidoscope of titty" - this is a great quote!
I always thought most of these make perfect sense. if you're a guy you only use 10% of your brain and thinking about sex every 7 seconds for a year would most likely make you suicidal at christmas; until the superbowl rolls around and the womens must pay for making us eat spiders in our sleep and then go swimming within 30 minutes. I used the other 90% of my brain to figure this out... between thoughts about sex! *8^D
dude don't lie, even if you're into big black women monique is icky
@streetvendor - 'homeless' includes being in temporary housing like women's refuges or staying with friends.
I've never heard the superbowl thing because I'm from the UK but it's actually true that domestic violence calls to police go up when Celtic and Rangers play eachother (2 rival Scottish soccer teams)compared to an average Saturday/Sunday, because they were talking about a strategy to deal with it last year.
I don't know what the joke's supposed to be for that Monique pic ( "Think about sex. Go ahead. Right now"). Is it supposed to be funny because, ha ha, she's a fat Black woman and everyone *knows* fat Black women (especially "loud" ones!) are inherently un-sexy? Or is the joke supposed to be "Duh! Of course some people think of sex when looking at a picture of a woman?" I'm not just asking to be an a*****e...I actually really want to know if I'm just missing something. And I really, really don't want my first interpretation to be the right one. Because every time a seemingly smart/progressive person is blatantly racist it's like my brand new puppy just got run over by a semi truck.
There's something inside your head.
THERE'S SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR HEEEAAAAD!
Grey matter, grey matter OOOOOWOOOOOOOOWOOOOOOO
In fairness to us Brits, the Daily Mirror isn't known for being one of the more upmarket or journalistically sound newspapers! And I would argue against the dental hygiene dig, as many of us have sparkling, straight, non-horsey teeth... but then again... judging by the British celebs shipped out to America, I can see where you get that impression...
That picture of Ron Jeremy had me debilitated for about 5 minutes.
Funny funny. Thanks for the laugh. The way I learned the 10% brain thing is that it was an honest misunderstanding of an actual fact. At any given moment we are probably using about 10%. But of course, which 10% it is changes constantly. I'm not thinking about philosophy right now, but I could in a few minutes, for instance.
Have you ever considered that calling these the 6 most frequently quoted bullshit statisics is, in fact, a bullshit statistic?
Ha! I knew this were fake!
I don't think I ever swallowed a spider, maybe a few flies, but no spiders.
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Perhaps another reason for the Christmas-suicide link: seasonal depression. Nothing to do with the holidays.