Excited Preacher

The preacher was wired for sound with a lapel mike, and as he preached, he moved briskly about the platform, jerking the mike cord as he went. Then he moved to one side, getting wound up in the cord and nearly tripping before jerking it again. After several circles and jerks, a little girl in the third pew leaned toward her mother and whispered, "If he gets loose, will he hurt us?"

Misunderstood People

1. They speak only the Greek language.
2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?
3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.
4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.
5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.
6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA's.
7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.
8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.
9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.
10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state.

Boxing Referee

And then there was the boxing referee who used to work for NASA; every time a fighter would go down, he'd start counting "10, 9, 8...."