What You Need to Know on a Need-to-Know Basis

For your eyes only (unless they cloud up reading this)

By Ed Goldman

1. Nine out of 10 doctors represent a full 90 percent of the medical profession.
2. If a futurist claims 97 percent accuracy for his or her predictions, make sure it isn’t 3 percent of the time.
3. Fifty percent of every gay marriage is the same gender as the other 50 percent. I’m pretty sure Google will bear me out on this.
4. Twenty percent of a country’s inhabitants also comprise one fifth of its total population.

5. In human evolution, the lap has always disappeared when one has stood up.
6. The more things change, the lessthey stay the same. If you heard otherwise, it must have been something you Googled.
7. In a voice-activated sports utility vehicle, intoning the name of artist Van Gogh should start the engine.
8. A man’s wing span is often the same as his height. The unanswered question is, No matter how tall he is, if a man has wings do you want him to date your daughter?

9. If “high-brow” means intellectual and “low-brow” means moronic, would it bring people together if they drank Miller High Life and Lowenbrau? And if they drank too much of it would they grow both smarter and dumber?
10. Why is the lengthiest home purchase called a “short sale” and a long-winded legal document  called a “brief”?
11. If a fraternity’s siege on a sorority used to be called a “panty raid,” why wasn’t a sorority’s siege on a frat house called the “boxers rebellion”?
12. Why do people lose their ability to parallel park, change lanes and use turn signals as soon as they buy a Prius?

13. Why is it always too late to make a long story short?
14. Why is nobody who starts a sentence by saying “In my humble opinion” humble?
15. Instead of saying “Let’s get together after the holidays” why don’t we just say, “I never plan to see you again”?
16. If brevity is the soul of charity, why’s it considered rude to say, “Shut up”?

17. Why does it induce instant animosity or narcolepsy when someone begins a sentence with, “As a scholar, I feel that…”?
18. No man will ever admit he was once a virgin or that he was never an athlete.
19. Most men tell their mechanics they’d have fixed the car themselves but ran out of time. They will also drop their “g’s” immediately when talkin’ to their mechanic about their car’s emittin’ fumes.
20. At one point or another, all of us believe that everyone else is kind of stupid. Even if we’d like to believe otherwise, we feel pretty confident about this assertion. 

21. Most stupid people aren’t aware of the fact that they’re stupid. How could they be?
22. Why don’t groceries cost less when we check-out and bag them ourselves? 
23. Why doesn’t gas cost less when we pump it ourselves?
24. What do baristas do to earn their tips when we order and pick up our coffee ourselves?