Eva Bradley: Statistically, we love gossip

Disraeli got it right with the whole "lies, damned lies and statistics" lark. Ever since my brother convinced me that 90 per cent of little sisters were happy to clean their siblings' rooms on Saturday mornings, I have always been a little gun-shy of the way numbers can be twisted to suit a purpose.
What also amazes me is how much time and intellect is expended in the pursuit of seemingly pointless and endless statistical analysis.
While it is undoubtedly useful to know what percentage of the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed each year, I'm not sure anyone wants or needs to know that 0.3 per cent of all road accidents in Canada involve a moose and the odds of being killed falling out of bed are one in two million.
The reality is, though, that at any given time thousands of clever people are dedicating their professional lives to the pursuit of useless statistics, many of them at the taxpayer's expense.
Today while reading the newspaper I was diverted by a major story dominating world headlines. Apparently it has now been statistically proven that women who win an Oscar for Best Actress are far more likely to wind up divorced than both losing nominees and male winners of the equivalent award.
Well stop the press.
My first reaction was a resoundingly female "well, duh", because as any successful woman knows there is nothing less attractive to the average bloke than a girl on top (professionally speaking, that is).
This thought was rapidly followed by a complete sense of bewilderment that a credible academic institution and the world's press could dedicate hours of research and valuable column inches to the length of time Oscar winners stay married (for the record, 4.3 years for winning women, 9.5 years for the losers).
Sadder still was the way my attention was instantly diverted away from the unfolding political chaos in Cairo to this snippet of utterly irrelevant Hollywood gossip. The newspaper article was probably the first I have read right to the end since Sandra Bullock got her gong and then hubby got gone.
The reality is that no amount of human rights breaches or environmental disasters is ever going to matter more to us than the lives of the Beautiful People, particularly when the news is about their failure to be happy.
It warms our collective cockles to know that while you can be enviously rich, famous and hot, you can't necessarily be happy or even hold onto your man.
Perhaps in that sense, then, the news story had more validity than I first gave it credit for.
The hard-hitting "real" news in the rest of the paper is important on a global scale but on a local level few of us are likely to get off our chuffs and do anything to make the world a better place just because we've read about the woes of the world in the paper.
Conversely, however, we can read about the hideous failures of the infallible and feel just a tiny bit better about ourselves in the process. Perhaps, then, there is room for these sorts of stories after all.
Meanwhile, I'm yet to see a valid justification for the statistician who recently dedicated his thesis to establishing that (assuming Rudolph was in front) there are 40,320 ways to rearrange the other eight reindeer.
Eva Bradley is an award-winning columnist.