Ways and means

Tonight's run was all about the mileage. I wanted an easy plod before a Long Sunday Run, and I was racking my brains thinking about where I could go for an hour.

I dug out the map, spotted some residential roads I'd not run before, Mapometer'ed a route on the laptop, put on my shoes and headed into the cold night air.

During my plod I considered how many variables there may be to get a similar mileage from my front step, and I thought back to fellow Janathoner Beanoutrunning's recent post "How many ways can you skin a cat?".  Whilst I remembered a supposed origin of the phrase, I got to wondering how many ways there might actually be to skin a cat.

So on my return I Googled it.

"Ways to skin a cat" turned up 45,600,000 responses. This was quite a few more than I expected, but a cursory glance through the top responses failed to reveal the answer to my question. So I decided to broaden my understanding, and check whether this was a reasonable number.

I deleted "skin a cat", and typed "slice an onion". After all, I could think of at least five ways to do that.

Six million responses.

Probably a little on the high side, but maybe some of those websites had copied each other. Still, my fuzzy mathematical mind quickly deduced that according to Google, there are (hang on, x over y, carry the two, hold on a minute) seven and a half times more ways to skin a cat, than slice an onion. Okay, that's probably worthy of a saying.


Hold on though, that still doesn't give me anything definite. How about I test my process by Googling something that has only one way? I deleted "slice an onion" and inserted "Amarillo". Tony Christie never sung "Is this one of the ways to Amarillo".

How wrong I was. Over sixteen million ways to Amarillo. Texas clearly has some enviable transport links.

It doesn't stop there.

Contrary to Paul Simon's gross underestimate of fifty, there are over eighteen million ways to leave your lover, which, according to Google, give the average cad as many options as surviving a hurricane.

What about the classics? Ways to a woman's heart revealed two hundred million permutations, whereas a man's heart seems twice as accessible. Does that mean that men fall in love too easily - or does it mean that the spaces in the male ribcage are a little wider, and the pulmonary organ sits a little nearer to the skin?


Eventually, I deleted everything, leaving only "Ways to", and saw what Google threw me. I was terrified. At the top of the shortlist, Google prompted "Ways to destroy the earth", suggesting that this was the question on everybody's lips. Seventy four million links. I feared for the future.

In a final bid to redeem the internet, I replaced "destroy" with "save".

The good news? There are over three times as many ways to save the earth than destroy it; and over six times more ways to the human heart as there are to skin a cat.

It turns out we're all lovers, not cat-skinners.



Tonight's run: 8.1miles, 1:04hrs, zero planets saved or destroyed.
Janathon total: 121.3miles. All my stats and maps are on RunningFreeOnline here
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