Forgive me. This is one of those posts that should just stay inside my head.
But I’ve been inundated in the last few hours by two things that have converged in my mind: talk of statistics and, well, cajones.
Having said that, you can decide for yourself whether you want to proceed.
I’ll speak to the statistics half of that equation, kicked off by an email exchange with a friend re Obama’s bizarre correlation implies causation between bitterness & guns & religion this last weekend (uh, no, Barack: probably not. but I did like your defense in Indiana.); hammered home by a quick glance at the Wilson Quarterly’s summation of Lorraine Daston’s The War Against Luck in the Winter issue of Daedalus which speaks to how the science of statistics in the 19th century undercut traditional notions of chance; and then kept alive by Neatorama’s brief citation of Evan Esar defining statistics as: "The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures."
This converged in my mind with the other half of the equation (and how that wound up in my brain I’ll leave y’all to wonder -- ‘cause there are some things a girl should keep to herself) and of course, Cynthia Plaster Caster came immediately to mind.
Maybe you’ve heard of Cynthia? She’s an artist and a “recovering groupie” who took plaster casts of rock and roll genitalia.
Once upon a time she had her collection of plaster casts on display online -- although it looks like they’ve been mothballed (regrettably) (but maybe I just didn’t poke around aggressively enough). I caught wind of her collection on (yes: it’s true) an NPR radio show some years back. It occurred to me that here was the data set we needed -- to determine whether there really is a correlation between the scale of one’s cajones and, well, one’s cajones.
Or at least one's ability to rock.
No evidence that the statistical analysis has been conducted. But like I said: Maybe I just need to look harder.
Or perhaps this strays into that unhappy Sizing China territory that we crossed into yesterday.
I regret that I have no photographic evidence to offer you. But I did stumble across a trailer for a rockumentary made of Cynthia and her work and released back in 2001. I missed it at the time. Maybe you caught it?
So. Something of modicum value for this morning’s post. Because we’re all about providing value here at detritus.
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