Sometimes being alive is a real drag

Ever heard the phrase "I am worth more dead than alive"? Ever thought it was true? Harry Wood, a man with a name that sounds like he is a porn star (don't think too long about that one...) does. His continued life means he has a mortgage again and his wife is 25,000 pounds poorer. I guess he should have died when that other guy did!


I guess this is as good a place as any for this little rant about death statistics. Things like this happen frequently. Hardly a month goes by that I don't read about someone collecting pension money for someone who died a week ago or someone being told they are dead while they are on the phone talking to the people telling them they died or some girl in New York lying dead in the living room for a few weeks or some other guy who died so long before it was discovered that when they figured it out he was actually mummified.

We have all these population statsitics, death statistics, birth statistics, and so forth that people rely on as if they have any sort of basis in reality when obviously we have no clue how many people are actually around. Maybe we should just round it to the nearest million (per state) and call it good...