Survey my middle finger and spin on it

 

September 2011

New research carried out by the department of complete imbeciles suggests that watching too much television will reduce your life expectancy even more than smoking. Apparently, if you watch even 3 hours of TV a day, you will take an hour off your life.

This startling revelation left me wondering how much television I actually watch. You see normally my evening consists of walking the arduous 5 feet from my office into the kitchen, cooking dinner and then sitting down with beloved to watch a film. After the film, we usually leave the telly on and watch whatever Dave has to offer. I would estimate that I probably watch 3 hours per day. Doing a bit of mental arithmetic, I worked out that I’m about 11,000 days old. Assuming that, on average, I’ve taken an hour off my life for every one of those, this would mean that I’ve reduced my life expectancy by a whopping 458 days. That’s over a year.

But hang on a minute. Isn’t watching the telly the same as using a computer? I mean it’s the same principle; you sit down in front of a screen and stare at it. Now, when I’m not whizzing around race tracks, I spend my day sat in front of a computer. I generally spend about 8 hours a day at my desk. Added to the 3 hours spent in front of the telly, I therefore spend 11 hours a day sat in front of a screen.

It doesn’t end there either. This doesn’t include the dozens of times I’ve been to the cinema. It doesn’t include all the time I spend looking at the timing monitor at races. When I take all this into consideration, by my calculations I’m going to die a week on Tuesday.

Of course this is all bollocks because whoever came up with the theory that watching telly kills you is an idiot. What they probably did was carry out a survey of a handful of couch potatoes and a handful of athletes and deduced that, because the couch potatoes all die younger, it must be the TV that does it. They don’t stop to think that it is the lifestyle that is the killer.

For instance, when I’m not being killed by my 42 inch, I’m usually in my gym, out on my bike, out for a run or out swimming. I also eat fruit and vegetables. This alone is going to mean I’m fitter, healthier and, as a result, less likely to die than Mr. Potato who sits on his lardy arse all day eating crisps, biscuits, take-away meals and whose only exercise comes from lifting his arm to work the remote control.

This is the problem with surveys. They are usually based on flimsy research conducted by a moron and used by the media to generate sensationalist headlines. Sometimes they are just plain silly. For instance, I read a story last week about an American survey carried out by the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that claimed teens are more likely to turn to hard drugs by using Facebook and Twitter. This evidence was based on the fact that apparently 70% of teens aged between 12 and 17 use social networking sites and, because of this, they’ve seen pictures of drunk and stoned people. As a result they are four times more likely to start taking marijuana, three times likelier to ram-raid a chemist and get prescription drugs without a prescription and twice as likely to buy alcohol. And since everyone knows that this will inevitably lead them to heroin and crack cocaine, Facebook must be shut down.

Personally I think institutes like the Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University should be shut down for coming up with such utter nonsense but that’s just my opinion.

It doesn’t end there however. There are surveys carried out by people like the Assembly of Safe Surfing and Healthy Online Learning Enterprises (ASSHOLE) who claim that 20% of children are “cyber-bullied” on these social networking sites. This basically constitutes somebody posting a status message on Facebook saying that Billy Hermit is a gay lord. Then there will be people like the Protection against Racism In Cyber Kingdoms (PRICK) who will claim that 95% of the black community believe Twitter is racist because their bird logo looks suspiciously like the hood of a Ku Klux Klan outfit. Then there will be the Protection of Underage Surfers and Safety of Youth (PUSSY) who will claim that 250% of the 50% surveyed believe that all social networking sites are actually the work of Satan himself and should be abolished before we all condemn ourselves to a fate worse than a holiday in Alabama.

Seriously, there was a recent outcry by the genuinely named Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he wanted to see more children on Facebook. With the 20% of children already being bullied on the site, this would only go to increase that percentage. Not to mention their worry about the Gary Glitter’s of this world because, you know, COPPA feel for kids.

Of course with the GCSE results having just been released, we have the surveys and statistics surrounding these. Every year we hear that grades have improved by a million percent over the previous year. Well, we all know that exam results are getting better each year because the exams are getting easier. This is largely because the papers are catering for the increased number of idiots in the world and are therefore counter-productive. So any comparison between current results and those from previous years is meaningless.

The other problem with the exams getting easier is that more stupid people are leaving school with an A* in maths even though they can’t add two single digit numbers together without using a calculator. And it’s these morons who go on to have jobs that involve accumulating statistics and producing surveys.

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