Friday, September 29, 2006
A Curious Incident Involving John Reid in a Lift
A curious incident reported by one of the masters of the blogging trade, Daniel Finkelstein. Making small talk, having just bumped into the Home Secretary in a lift, Daniel said he felt hungover, though he only ever touches Diet Coke. Watch out for that Aspartame, Danny. Reid, in return, quotes a union leader to the effect that sleep is the cause of all hangovers. This appears to be an interesting case of a dodgy correlation - you tend to sleep before you get a hangover, but that does not implicate the sleep itself. It's dodgy because heavy lunches often produce hangovers without the aid of sleep. But it's not necessarily dodgy because of the common sense assumption that alcohol causes hangovers. Say, for example, everybody smoked heavily. Smoking would not then be the cause of lung cancer. Think about it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
It would be a genetic issue
ReplyDeleteShortly after September 11 2001, I was laid off from my job at the Australian branch of the investment bank for which I was then working. My employer decided to get the mass sackings over and done with early in the day, so I was pretty much free to go by about 10am. What then happened was that pretty much everybody - both those who were sacked and those who had survived for the moment - went to the pub and started drinking heavily. The sacked had more or less sympathetic drinks bought for them by the non-sacked, and as a consequence I was pretty seriously drunk by lunchtime. The hangover arrived at about 7pm, if I recall correctly.
ReplyDeleteA very resonant hangover, Michael. A hangover after 9/11 is, of course, common to us all.
ReplyDelete