Anon! A mouse!

Anonymous left an instructional Wikipedia link on my “All Smug in their Beds” post from March 28. Anonymous thinks that by providing a single example of a pebble bed reactor going bad, s/he has demonstrated the futility of using them for any purpose, anywhere, ever again.

I sure hope Anonymous doesn’t travel by car, train, bus, surfboard, ship, plane, horse, truck, skateboard, roller skates, snowmobile, dogsled, skis, or on his/her feet, because I’ve seen at least one fatal accident involving each of those.

I also hope Anonymous doesn’t sleep in a bed, because 400 people die each year falling out of them.

I really hope Anonymous stays away from all liquids, because people drown every day.

And I also hope s/he doesn’t try to eat anything, because the morgues are full of choking victims.

Need I go further?

There’s a wonderful scene in one of Steven Brust’s books - The Phoenix Guards, I think - where a character speaks about getting too caught up in “What if?”. His elegant and succinct point is that they would become completely immobile, afraid to throw a stick into a stream on the chance that it had somehow become poisoned.

Life is risky. Are you a man or a mouse?

You know what cats do to mice.