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Slow News Day Open Thread
Is Friday the 13th really bad luck? No. Of course not. But they actually wasted time and money to conduct a study to prove it.
Dutch statisticians have established that Friday 13th, a date regarded in many countries as inauspicious, is actually safer than an average Friday.Maenwhile, the sun is eerily quiet. Could it mean the beginning of another ice age?
A study published on Thursday by the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics (CVS) showed that fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays.
The sun's surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun's 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.Turning to more earthly and slightly more irrelevant matters, my favorite guilty pleasure, 24, has announced that John Voight (the actor!) will be playing a bad guy next season. I'm still kind of pissed that the writers strike left me without Jack Bauer saving the world this year by using tactics he learned on the set of The Lost Boys. But next season is definitely looking up.
In his first series role in 40 years, Jon Voight has signed on as a recurring character on the upcoming seventh season of "24."
On the Emmy-winning Fox drama, Voight will play the uber-nemesis of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), who is pulling the strings behind next season's terrorist threat.
Oh. And in case you didn't know, John McCain is old.
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Comments (7)
Friday the XIII is always the best day!
June 13, 2008 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hillary Clinton, despite promising to "work her heart out" to get Barack Obama elected, is nowhere to be found.
I could speculate that despite her claims, she really doesn't want Obama to win and she won't (and isn't) working her heart out to get him elected, but in the interest of party unity, I won't.
June 13, 2008 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dude, it's been a week. Maybe she went on vacation. Seems to me that at 61, after working 7 days a week, 20 hours a day for a year and a half, she might need a little R&R.
June 13, 2008 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
In an effort to block gaymarriages from taking place, a conservative county in California is halting ALL marriages.
Its a reasonable solution. Either make marriage available to everyone, or make it available to no one. It's all about fairness, you know.
June 13, 2008 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, it's not as silly as you might think. Self-fulfilling prophecies have a way of putting some surface-level validity into some superstitions. In this case, it had the opposite effect, possibly because people are more cautious on Friday the 13th, so it actually ends up being a safer day.
June 13, 2008 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Only if my anticipated time with Battlestar Galactica is interrupted or displaced by Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.
June 13, 2008 8:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
WEll, it wasn't too lucky for Tim.
June 13, 2008 10:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
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