country kills

You've got to love the Ig Nobel Awards. They salute the funny side of science every year. The whole thing is an exercise in tipping the hat and grinning a sly grin at modern science. Exploring such deep issues as the five-second germ rule in food science and farting in fish communication, the Annals of Improbable Research do the world a great favor.

And they've also got my back when it comes to country music. In the area of public health, they sent academic air-kisses to a study about country music, which I detest with a passion.

It was a study called "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide" that garnered the prize for Medicine for Steven Stack of Wayne State University and James Gundlach of Auburn University.

According to the study, published in Social Forces, "The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate."

In keeping with this new research, I demand that country music stations improve public health by only playing country music by crossover divas whose songs are about having sex with cute guys and/or dumping them. This will improve public health and well-being. It will also increase the queer quotient on country stations, because songs like that tend to be so campy. And I can take country, so long as it's campy.

And no one need ever die from country music again.

With any luck, there will be no need to witness tacky coffee mugs like this in the office break room again...



Spare us from this insanity!

Situation solved.