93.8 Percent

Steven Wright once said, 93.8 percent of all statistics are made up. I buy that. There are those stats that are demonstrably true. For example, nearly all skiing accidents that result in broken legs happen on the skier's last run. Or, lost car key searches end when the seeker finds them in the last place they look. That's a 100 percenter.

Here are some that have a fictitious ring to them. At least to me. I was at a cocktail party wearing an ace bandage covering an injury suffered in a homeowner accident. Ninety-eight percent of homeowner accidents happen at home. Did you know that? Anyway, I had an ace bandage on my wrist and a fellow partygoer asked about it. I lied, "I had an accident less than a mile from my house, can you believe it?" He said, "Nearly ninety percent of accidents happen within a mile of your house." I said, "Dangerous neighborhood. Perhaps I should move."

I was at the muffler shop, not because I needed a new muffler. I just like muffler shops. A gentleman smoking a cigarette and holding an air wrench said, "Turkeys can fly at 45 miles an hour." I was interested. This is why I like muffler shops. How do we know this? One way to test the thesis would be to snare a turkey (test subject,) and drive the 2004 Ford Ranger (the consistent estimator,) to a straightaway in, say, Emery Mills, on Route 109. Drive like a bat out of hell, which is 45 mph in the 2009 Ford Ranger, let the bird go and see if he can catch me. The probability of achieving meaningful results in this experiment seems statistically unlikely. So, I think this data (CMA: or these data depending on your adherence to the specificity of data as a mass noun. That's another discussion altogether) falls (or fall) somewhere along the bell curve of the 93.8 percent. Just thinking out loud.