no smart chicks, please

I saw a headline on Yahoo! this morning that read:

Snow Shuts Down Major California Highway

I thought immediately of the Treasury Secretary and was offended by his lack of compassion for his fellow man. People need to get places; they need to get back home after the holiday weekend. Shouldn't Secretary Snow be working to support the dollar instead of letting it slide against foreign currencies rather than creating mischief?

I had time to read the story, however, and I realized it was not some shenanigan of that mother of a Treasury Secretary, but rather one of mother nature. My bad. I was all set to light into him, verbally, but now I guess I’ll have to find something else to talk about.

Fortunately, something else caught my interest and so I can leave John Snow in peace-- for at least today, anyway. I read a story about a study in Great Britain that indicated that smart women were less likely to get married than smart men. Forty percent fewer women in the survey got married for each 16-point rise in IQ. The article quoted a writer who said that intelligent men preferred a less brainy partner. It went on to say that high IQ men tended toward demanding jobs and they tended to look for old fashioned women like their mothers, whom I infer by what I read must not be very intelligent.

As either Disraeli or Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Someone else said that the numbers don’t lie, but I am questioning the conclusions drawn by this article. My own mother, for example, while spurning the fields of brain surgery and rocket science, was primarily a home maker during my formative years, although she did work briefly in the electronics field when I was in college. She was fully capable of managing the household and solving the problems of her children, and despite the fact she married my father, she is an intelligent woman. Not that marrying my father was a bad choice in itself. I was meaning getting married, period. I’m sure some of you sniggered recently when I mentioned the problems she was having with her internet service provider. No matter how smart or dumb we are, we’ve all had those problems. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. All right, then. I didn’t think I would see any rocks flying.

As my second example, I would like to use Jimbo’s girlfriend. Many of you will be quick to point out that the survey numbers involved getting married and obviously she and Jimbo have not yet achieved that particular goal. Again, my girlfriend has not performed brain surgery lately nor launched any spaceships, but she has a responsible managerial position, and, in fact, has been married before. Her favorite television program is Sex and the City, and frequently I watch it with her. Now, if you’ve ever seen the show, it is about four single women in New York, all good looking, and any one of those babes could be married anytime they would want to, but they seem to be discriminating. It’s not like they hop in the sack with the first stranger that comes along. Okay, I guess some of them do, but the point I am trying to make is that the decision as to whom to marry rests at least fifty percent with women and I contend it is a much higher percentage than that. Sometimes we guys think we are calling the shots, when, in fact, we are not nearly as in charge as we think.

The interpretation of data can be subjective and sometimes even the smartest of us can make incorrect assumptions based on exactly the same information. I think the conclusion drawn from the data may be slightly skewed. My own interpretation, although it is also subject to the test of incorrect conclusions being drawn, is that smarter women may be more discriminating about whom they choose to marry. Perhaps if given a choice, smarter women my decide the alternative of being single is preferable.

Of course, being a man, I could be wrong.

In life, as in Jimbo’s world, there are always two or more ways to look at things.