Reportable accident
I am thirty years old. I have used my time adventurously: whitewater boating, downhill skiing, martial arts, and so on. And through all of these adventures, I have managed to avoid reporting to the emergency room for even a single stitch. This weekend, I managed to slice my hand open on a broken glass while doing the dishes, requiring two stitches. What kind of world do we live in, where a man can spend several years of his life safely engaged in mixed martial arts — no-holds-barred fighting with other full-grown men — but be sent to the hospital while cleaning a water glass? I have jumped off cliffs wearing skis! I have paddled rafts through rapids where people drowned the week before, where rivers break boats over rocks with irresistible force!
And this is where regression to the mean chooses to draw the line — at the sink.
paperback writer:
Were you distracted?
21 April 2008, 12:23 pmColin:
I am a father, so I am ever distracted. Took me a solid week to work my way through that Bladé book (Quatorze Superstitions de la Gascogne), which was just over 50 pages.
22 April 2008, 11:49 amguyal:
(la, you’re on my blogroll, dude, so I thought I’d check in after only 2 years, hope things are well, anyhoo…)
I used to work with an ex-Army guy and an ex-Air Force guy, and one day at lunch in MV, the conversation went something like:
Army Guy - “At Ft. Bragg, they had a sign at the entrance of the base - ‘It’s been X days since our last fatal accident’ - and the number never got into double digits!”
AF Guy - “When you were at Bragg? I was there too. Yeah, that sign was crazy!”
AG - “There was that time when all the paratroopers were standing on the runway in full gear and that cargo plane came tumbling down the runway in a big fireball and the paratroopers were too weighted down to move out of the way!”
AFG - “hahahahaha. Yeah, and there was always some guy back from the field who found out his wife was cheating. Murder-suicide!”
AG - “hahahaha. Yeah, and remember when…”
And they’d go on like that for 15 minutes. So maybe you should have a counter on your homepage of how long its been since your last stitching. Some form of morbid positive feedback
I was going to say, “you could always branch out into bladed weapons for your mixed martial arts if you want more stitches” but the only proper answer to that is something like “I have mastered the Scottish Skean Dhu dagger, the Khukiri, the Kitana Baker and Merovingian Glafe with nary a scratch, sir”
Happy Sunday
25 May 2008, 6:19 am