Things My Parents Said by Dave LeSueur

ANOTHER HILARIOUS piece by our Favorite Columnist, BHS '67 Alumni, Dave LeSueur!

Things My Parents Said

Researchers in Omaha, Nebraska have confirmed that the advice my parents gave me when I first went out on my own was true: don’t go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. The study showed that people who shop for groceries while hungry tend to choose items with more calories and also buy more junk food. A spokesman for the study recommended eating a snack right before shopping. In case you’re interested in more details, here is the link.

www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/06/us-shop-hungry-idUSBRE9450TF20130506

I was curious whether other things my parents told me were equally true, so I went to the study’s website. As I had hoped, there were a number of helpful reports. Unfortunately, the links to those studies no longer work, so you will have to be satisfied with the summaries I have put together. The statements by my parents are in bold.

Turn off the lights! Do you think I own stock in the electric company? It turns out that 70% of parents who say this actually DO own stock in the electric company, usually through their 401(k) plans.

If everyone else were jumping off of a bridge, would you jump too? Mothers brought in children who were doing something because “everyone else was doing it.” The kids were taken to a bridge and were told that their friends had all jumped off of it. 30% of the children jumped off of the bridge. The ones who survived all said they would never do it again.

Make sure you put on clean underwear before you leave the house. You never know when you might be in an accident and end up in the hospital. The kids in the prior study were used for this one as well. They were all given this advice by their mothers before being brought to the bridge. 80% of them chose to wear clean underwear. Researchers talked to the kids who survived the fall and found that the ones wearing clean underwear were treated better at the hospital. However, no correlation was found between wearing clean underwear and surviving jumping off of a bridge.

How many times do I have to tell you? According to the study, 7 times.

Why? Because I said so! Researchers examined nearly 5000 cases where a mother gave this response to a child and concluded that the mother was justified 100% of the time. Oddly enough, the study provided no data or reasoning to support the claim. I called my own mother to ask her why, and she said “Because I said so!”

Someday you’ll thank me for this. This study was the most requested one by parents in the Omaha area. Researchers followed nearly 25,000 children for 30 years. So far, none of them has thanked their parents for that.

Beds are not made for jumping on. It was determined that it was too dangerous to test this hypothesis on humans. So the Study Center asked a Norwegian animal trainer named Peta to bring in some subjects. Soon there were three little monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell off and broke his head. Peta called the doctor and the doctor said “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” The study was immediately terminated without reaching a conclusion. I did a Google search on “Beds made for jumping on” and couldn’t find any. This seems like a great opportunity for some entrepreneur out there.

Do you think your socks are going to pick themselves up? This study tried to answer two questions. First, how many children actually THOUGHT that the socks were going to pick themselves up? The answer was 21%. Second, how often did the socks ACTUALLY pick themselves up? Disappointingly, that only happened 1% of the time.

There were some other studies, but I don’t remember them and as I said before, the links are no longer working. But if you have any other questions, let me know and I’ll ask my friend Ted who lives down the street. He knows a lot of stuff.

David LeSueur lives in Littleton Colorado with his wife Mary. They always eat their vegetables just in case there are still some kids starving in India.

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http://lesueur926.blogspot.com/