Oliver Twits

Rest easy, everyone! Yes, the North American economy has well and truly shit the bed and our government is poised to resume its massive clusterfuck status after a nearly two month-long hiatus, but there's some very heartening news in the papers these days as well!

A recent study released by the British Medical Journal found that Oliver Twist's diet was entirely adequate from a nutritional standpoint. I don't know about you, but that's a huge fucking load off my mind.

Forgetting for a moment the more overwhelmingly stupid aspect of the study, let's look at some of the smaller issues raised by this ingenious and entirely worthwhile piece of work.

In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes the workhouse menu as three meals of "thin" gruel a day, an onion twice a week, half a bread roll on a Sunday. Using a methodology that becomes worthless as soon as its embarked upon, the sharp minds behind the study decided to change the one piece of evidence they had to go on and then use their substitute information to arrive at their conclusion. Referring to surviving evidence from period workhouses as well as existing laws in England, they've concluded that this gruel wasn't thin (take THAT, Chas!), and the 1.75 litres of gruel had enough nutritional content to sustain the Dickensian whiner.

Of course, they're going on the assumption that there was any sort of standardization in such workhouses and completely missing the point that Dickens was trying to convey as miserable an existence as possible. And by unilaterally deciding the gruel was thick and hearty, despite what Dickens said, the whole study is redundant. Oh, and that 1.75 litres a day? They plucked that handy statistic out of nowhere. Nice research!

See, if you have one primary piece of evidence and some vague possibilities, you don't go with the latter. If that's how they figure out problems, it's scary to think that they're doctors. The lead researcher, one Sue Thornton, pediatric dietitian, likely isn't the sharpest diagnostician.


Hypothetical medical emergency:

Your kid eats a rusty nail. You rush him to the doctor. The nail is sticking out of his stomach.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "What's the matter?"

You: "My kid ate a rusty nail!"

Your kid: "I ate a rusty nail!"

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Ate a rusty nail, eh? No, you're wrong. He has scurvy. Eat more fruit."

Your kid dies.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Yup, scurvy."

You stab the doctor in the eye with a syringe.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Oh my God! You broke my leg!"

In fact, my own literary study of A Christmas Carol finds the story has numerous flaws. Dickens often refers to snow and cold. However, I chose to ignore that he said the story takes place in England. My own research shows that it occurred in Havana. Therefore, the whole tale is bullshit.

As I alluded to before, there is an overwhelming stupid aspect to this study as well. That is, of course, that Oliver Twist is a fucking work of fiction. British scientists and researchers actually took the time and effort to conclude that a fictional character's diet was nutritionally adequate.

Meanwhile in the U.K., one person dies of lung cancer almost every 15 minutes.

7,950 people die of AIDS every day.

And we have doctors researching the possible diet of a fictional character.

"Studies" in general can be a fount of completely useless and pointless information. The Oliver Twist one is just stupid because it's a waste of everyone's time. But also very common are the really obvious ones.

For example, a 2008 study by two American University profs found that as gas prices go up, car accident fatalities go down. Thank God we have university profs to fill in that cryptic middle step that people drive less when gas costs more.

And here's another; parents are generally found to be happier when their kids leave the home and are no longer a drain on the parental resources. Who would have guessed? Until they shed the light on that issue, I always figured my parents were heartbroken when I left home and became financially independent.

Another brilliant study released in 2008 concluded that, had Al Gore won the presidency of the United States, he also would have invaded Iraq. That one might be even better than the Oliver Twist one, because there's nothing to base it on. At least the Oliver Twist guys had some evidence to work with. The Gore study is bulletproof because it can never be proven wrong.

It's dispiriting that we live in this day and age when academics and scientists a) continue to receive funding despite being incredibly fucking lazy, b) get such lax oversight on their funding that they can research such worthless things when there are more important issues and/or c) think that the general population is so goddam stupid that we need to have these less-than-startling "truths" revealed to us.

Of course, another, unintentional consequence of the Twist study is that it's ruining this esteemed work of fiction. It turns a bold, starving boy into a whiner. Adhering to the same intellectual rigour as the Oliver-studiers, I've concluded that, as the employee of the wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit would have made a lot of money. However, he lived in a cold house and wore tattered clothes. Where did the money go? I'm forced to conclude he spent it on whores and opium. There goes the warm fuzziness of A Christmas Carol, lying dead before the sword of my ingenious research! No character must be spared!

Next week, I'll present the damning evidence that Bambi actually killed his own mother, since you don't see any hunters do it onscreen. Stay tuned!