Thanks again, MSNBC

Well, the Editor once again refused to admit that the only thing to be done about a hangover is to just suffer the torments of the damned until you stop feeling whatever misery you're feeling. So, I found myself on google looking for "hangover remedies", in a desperate bid for a page which reads "Click this link and your nausea will disappear! Magic elves standing by!" You know you're having a bad day when the magic elves sound like a good idea. Anyway. I found this fuckwitted commentary from MSN:

This is serious business. In a 2000 paper, Tulane University researcher Dr. Jeff Wiese and other researchers concluded that drinking cost the United States $148 billion in lost productivity each year, most of it from next-day hangovers at work.

How did they come up with this figure, for one, and two, how much university funding went into these results? What kind of researchers are they, anyway? And really, does it take a team of professors to prove that having a manic team of jackhammering mice rampaging through your skull makes you slightly less able to function normally? And in the end, okay, given most jobs out there, does it matter if that email Re: Accounting Procedures gets to the Assistant Marketing Flunky twenty-five seconds later than it would have, because you actually went out and enjoyed yourself for a few hours the day before? Could the mind-numbing bureaucratic bullshit which most people spend their days doing possibly be related to the need to drink themselves into some kind of stupor when finished for the day? Also, what about all of the enormous revenues being pumped into the economy by people spending money on all of the booze required for a $148 billion hangover - I bet the nation spends more than that trumped-up figure on nightlife every year. (FYI, cheap tequila has been found by many independent researchers to reliably cause at least a one billion dollar hangover, if you'd like to contribute to your company's loss of productivity anytime soon.)

It seems that MSN feels that it's a serious problem that adults can go out and drink, and then get up and go to work the next day - all based on something that someone said about something, at some point. I just love the proliferation of completely unsupported statistics, particularly in relation to random facts which are irrelevant in the first place. I'm going to start titling my posts "New Study Indicates that 46.3% of Rhesus Monkeys Don't Like Cheese" and "Startling Number of Cheetos Consumers also Prefer Mint-Waxed Dental Floss", or perhaps, "100% of Editors are Bored as Fuck by Pointless Graphs Which Only Demonstrate Topography of Own Navel". How about "Research Indicates $806 Billion Spent in 2004 on Researching Statistics Relating to Statistical Research". Disprove that figure if you can, I'm going to go and decrease my productivity with a quick one.