Most Depressing Day of the Year

What does a scientist do when he is bored? He develops a formula to calculate the most depressing day of the year. Today, January 21, 2008 is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. Now our esteem researcher, Dr. Cliff Arnall from Cardiff University in Wales, has calculated that the 3rd Monday of January is truly a Blue Monday. He factors in bad weather, credit card debts from Christmas spending, failed New Year’s resolutions and a few other categories to get to his conclusion.

Well, let's see. If you are a Green Bay Packers or San Diego Chargers fan you will be depressed today because your teams lost the championship games yesterday. The fans don’t need a scientist to tell them that. I can sit here and think up 50 other reasons why people can be depressed today, but it is a futile exercise, because I can also think of 50 reasons why this theory is fallible. For the other factors used, what if you are a level-headed person that bought small Christmas presents cash and within your means and you have no credit card debt? What if you don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions?

What Dr. Arnall could have and maybe should have done was to sample actual people across the world and have some real data to back up his theory instead of coming up with a mathematical formula. Probably the only group of people that is depressed today is the taxpayers of Britain who had to pay this guy’s salary while he came up with this nonsense. In the mean time I think he is the laughing stock of the depressed world. Mathematically speaking of course.