50th: Popping Bubble Wrap
Really short blog follows . . .
According to a recent (and ongoing) suvery by "Bachelor's" soups in the UK, and published by the UK Telegraph newspaper on New Year's eve, popping bubble wrap is the 50th most pleasuring activity one can undertake.
Interestingly, in this list of Life's Greatest Pleasures, sex only manages to get to third.
The following table shows the Top 20 and the all important 50th (Popping bubble wrap; seriously), with a sampling of other Greatest Pleasures between 21 and 49.
I was not happy with this top 50 of "Lifes Greatest Pleasures". I mean, just to start with, where the Sam Hill is "Taking photographs"? And what about "Driving in the country"? Okay. Okay. I realise that this list was compiled in the UK based on feedback from 'english' people, but then where is "Pheasant shooting" (not to be confused with "Peasant shooting") or that well known old favourite of all English lads, "Train spotting"—where you quickly dab passing high-speed trains with a 'spot' of bright paint (I think it is something like that anyway, never having done it myself)?
I went to the Telegraph newpaper site, and then the referring Indian Times site, and then dug deep to find the Bachelors Soup site source (not 'sauce', source), in search of more information about the demographics and social make-up of contributors to the list. Could not find anything. But it is pretty obvious to someone as switched on and astute as myself (cough) that the vast majority of contributors to this survey, if not 100 percent of them, must have been female.
Take for example number 45: "Getting a new hair style". Now there might be a modicum of 'pleasure' in this for some of us males, but I figure this activity would probably be battling to make it to number 100 if this was a Top 100 list. And then there is "A girly-night in" (No. 29), and "Curling up on the sofa with a good book and a hot drink" (No. 13), and "Someone saying you look nice" (No. 12). This is clear evidence that the set of respondents was heavily skewed in the female direction.
I thought I might put a couple of hours into it and fix this list up; make it more representative real-world balanced list of pleasures—where at least 30 percent of the respondents were male. But after just working on the first correction I spotted the problem. They would not be able to publish such a real-world list in the Telegraph newspaper. So, maybe they had a real-world list when they started but they had to censor it and then re-number it for general consumption. I guess we will never know.
Barry.