A multidisciplinary research team representing 12 universities, 4 government agencies, 2 independent thinktanks, and 1 nonprofit group called a press conference earlier today to reveal their findings. Said Heather Everett, a world-acclaimed economist from the University of Chicago and principle investigator for the study: "After 5 years of capacity building, strategizing and planning, pursuing grant support, collecting and analyzing data, and carefully vetting our results with expert colleagues around the world, the WGOITBRG [What Goes on in Tourists' Brains Research Group] is now ready to share our main and most important cutting-edge result, which is that tourists are morons.
"Surprisingly, very little of our input variables explained patterns in residuals other than the mere dichotomous 'yes' or 'no' dummy variable..." (Everett took a minute to chuckle at the unintended pun) "...of whether or not someone was on vacation. Nothing else seemed to matter- home location, level of education, race, ethnicity, gender, trip destination, socioeconomic status, etc."
Continued Everett, "We examined differences between control group subjects (who stayed at home) and those traveling to national parks in the U.S., major cities in Europe, all-inclusive vacations in the Bahamas, safari adventures in southern Africa, trekking trips to the Himalayas and Andes, spiritual yoga retreats to India, and even road trips to Disney World. We expected to find wide differences in tourist intelligence, resilience, and problem-solving based on the location and degree of ease related to their trip itinerary and various background factors. In the end, however, none of that mattered, because all tourists appear to be stupifyingly-dumb mindless idiot-morons capable of the most jaw-dropping, ignorant, thoughtless, brainless bullshit imaginable."
"Quite frankly," Everett added, "we were shocked that some of these selfy-stick-using retards could even tie their own shoes."
Subsequent to additional background about the study, another team member, Gerald Von Grindewald from the U.S. State Department, provided specific examples of questions and statements made by subjects during the course of the 5 year study. The quotes, reprinted verbatim herein [see archives] but with the subject names removed to protect subjects' identities, are a small but representative subset of the overall population of responses. Here are a few highlights:
"What's the weather like on the weekends?"
[from a tourist in Dubai]
"Rivers flow north?"
[from a tourist traveling from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea on the Nile]
"What time in the summer do the deer turn into elk?"
[from a tourist in Yellowstone National Park]
"I can't wait for the fireworks!"
[from a tourist in Paris on the afternoon of July 4th]
"I'm the king of the world!"
[from a tourist standing on the rail, leaning forward, at the front of an Alaskan cruiseship, moments before falling 100s of feet to his death into an icy fjord]
Note from the editor: the full list of quotes is quite lengthy and may be viewed in its entirety in our archives.
Everett concluded the press conference by thanking her collaborators and the NSF, and told the assembled reporters that the WGOITBRG intended to: "publish its scholarly findings in Nature and several other leading international peer-review journals" and that she anticipated future research activities to focus on comparisons between the intelligence of various household pets and tourists at all-inclusive resorts.
James Cannon, the Science and Humanity Coordinator for the nonprofit group, Light Travel, which was the only nonprofit group collaborating in the study, was heard leaving the press conference and muttering: "Scholarly? My ass. Jesus. Five hundred thousand dollars for this crap, and I can't get a goddamn $12K grant to pay for minority kids to travel to their nearest park. Jesus."
No comments:
Post a Comment