Build Date: Tue Feb 11 22:40:10 2025 UTC
I am all like Rasputin and shit. They call me the Ogre Juggernaut...
-- Tjames Madison
133% of Americans Think Polls Make Their Opinion Worth Something
2000-01-31 17:18:57
I got a statistic for you-- imagine an average American. Got it? OK, now imagine that 50% of the US is dumber than that. Now give 75% of Americans access to computers. Finally set up a "news" site entirely devoted to reporting on the outcome of polls and combine that with the recent finding that show the more incompetent you are the less likely you are to know it... Volia-- Yahoo! Public Opinion.
Ah yes, public polling! How in the world did I manage to get through my day without knowing that "40.4% [of adults nationwide] agreed that indoor plumbing has been the single greatest addition to the 20th century home." Or that "Bugs Bunny & Friends Show was chosen Best of the Century by 26.3% of respondents."
Eh, but it all sounds so harmless, a kinda small-scale online mob-mentality that can reassure America's dumb-asses that they are in the in-crowd, at least when it comes to plumbing and cartoons. But what about real issues? Does the fact that 61.6% of 968 adults (who had nothing better to do than answer a phone survey) think Elian Gonzalez should be returned to Cuba mean anything?
Why do 968 random people's opinions matter more than one random person's opinion? What if you went to the hospital for major surgery and instead of 1 trained doctor you had 1324 adults from a nation-wide sampling vote on how to proceed?
Now I'm not saying I'm some kinda anti-democracy freak-o or anything-- I believe people should be able to vote on things that will affect their own lives. For example dumb-asses should be able to be ruled by dumb-ass laws. Self-righteous pricks have my blessing to elect self-righteous prick officials.
But that's exactly what's wrong with all the big hype and attention that's given to public polls. They shouldn't be part of a NEWS site, they should be on the back page with the horoscopes and comics... but that's just my opinion.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Pigdog dispatched special correspondent Ratsnatcher for a holiday reconnaissance of America's frozen hell. After ten days of silence, our shortwave radio cackled with Ratsnatcher's static-filled transmission. (More...)
Datelined "Historic Mariposa," the fateful press release came in like an angry wind, announcing the release of a self-produced album, "Ordinary Hero," by occasional Pigdog contributor Thom Stark, in the language and tone of a Major Event, setting off a brief firestorm around the pigdog mailing list. (More...)
Experimenter is a film released in 2015 starring Peter Sarsgaard. It tells the story of Dr. Stanley Milgram's life, including the infamous Milgram electric shock experiment, tests on crowds, and his work developing a theory on the mechanics of social networks. It currently streams on Netflix. (More...)
First there was the Bloody Mary: Vodka, Tomato Juice, Worcestershire sauce, some spices, and celery. We drank it, and it was good. Then any drink with tomato juice got a prefix of "bloody" attached to it. We drank them, and they were mostly bad. Now Pigdog gets back to basics and introduces The Bloody Dog, a drink with REAL BLOOD in it. HUMAN BLOOD. (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
The quest for knowledge never ends at the super top secret Spock Mountain Laboratory, although it is frequently interrupted by beverage breaks. Recently, a team of crack ethnomixologists returned from a dangerous expedition to the frozen expanse of Canada with the much sought recipe for a Spocktail that is destined to replace blunt force head trauma as the major cause of brain damage in the civilized world. (More...)