Fatality, and other elevensies risks.

Several people yesterday linked to this article by Caitlin Moran (who I admit to having had a bit of a thing for before she contracted Internet Disease) in which she looks at the recent ‘risk grading’ of various types of biscuit based on the likelihood of sustaining an injury whilst eating one. To quote the article, it is useful to note that the Custard Cream is apparently the most dangerous biscuit, with a rigorously scientific-looking Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation rating of 5.63.
It’s a sobering realisation that, if these figures are true, then more people in the UK were killed by Custard Creams last year than were killed by Ecstacy. I concede it is possible that this disparity was caused by the quite remarkable sums of money spent trying to stop people getting their hands on the odd tablet, but it must be said that if the government wanted to prevent people taking their lives into their hands with reckless Ginger Snap consumption then it probably wouldn’t be too hard to stop them. I’m rather looking forward to the War on biscuits, and I’ll be in the crowd with a camera when the McVities factory in Stockport is stormed by the SAS.
What this really highlights is not that a packet of Rich Tea should carry a Severe Threat Assessment warning, but instead just how dangerous pretty much, well, everything is.
Unfortunately I don’t have any figures for the UK to hand, but a quick browse of the Statistical Abstract of the United States – a thrilling publication – gives us some really quite diverting information. It seems that the most innocuous of activities and items are potentially lethal deathtraps littering up the home. Did you know, for example, that every year in excess of 400,000 US citizens will suffer injuries involving ‘Beds, mattresses and pillows’? That’s about 2,000 people every day or, to put it another way, by the time you’ve finished reading this post another five Americans will have come a cropper with their soft furnishings*. These are injuries which required medical treatment, you understand – the endless legions who had a run-in with a pillow but bravely shrugged off their injuries and carried on aren’t counted.

Question to American readers: What are you lot doing over there?

Anyway, as Caitlin gave a list of the ten most common ways that Americans assume we British die, might I present

The ten most frequent causes of death in the USA, as believed by the British

1) Shot by Donald Rumsfeld.
2) Abducted by the saucermen, never to be seen again.
3) Cerebral haemorrhage caused by shock at the discovery there are places beyond US borders.
4) Terminated on the orders of Barack Obama’s social health ‘death committees.’
5) Scalped by injuns attacking the iron horse which runs across their territory.
6) Hunted to death by inbred, snaggle-toothed backwoodsmen.
7) Telling your buddies that you’re getting short on your tour, and showing them a picture of your best gal back home.
8) Beheaded with a machete shortly after having sex.
9) Being proven wrong in your belief that the second amendment covers artillery and chemical weapons.
10) Getting wasted in a drive-by after winning an award which should have gone to Beyonce, goddammit.

^{*If you don’t find this funny then you have no soul.}