Fri. 13

Did you know …

That it was Friday the 13th just this last Friday? It’s true! I waited a couple of days to write about it, because it’s bad luck to talk about the 13th on the 13th. Sort of like when someone is pitching a no hitter, but instead of baseballs, they’re throwing black cats. And instead of throwing them over a plate, they’re throwing them under ladders, where batters try to hit the cats with dead seagulls and mirrors. What a game!

So is Friday the 13th really unlucky, or is that just the sort of thing old wives talk to each other about when they aren’t passing judgement on their foreign neighbors? Well, that’s hard to say. As a scientist (I consider myself sort of an honorary scientist), I try to make a distinction between associations and actual causal relationships, and no one has ever been able to discover any kind of bad luck mechanism that is activated when the 13th of the month and a Friday coincide.

That said, if you look at the statistics, you’ll see that on average more than 95% of the human decapitations that occur each year happen on Friday the 13th(s).  So, yeah, think about that.