The July 2, 2009 edition of the New York Times carried an article with the headline, “In New York City, Fewer Murders on Rainy Days.” The headline pretty much says it all.

According to the article, when it’s dry, there are, on average, about 17 murders every ten days in New York City. On days when there is an inch or more of rain, the average drops to 14 murders every 10 days.

That doesn’t sound like a large drop, but it represents about a 5.9% reduction in murders on wet days. That’s still not huge, but it’s probably statistically significant.

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The recent trials and tribulations of someone who writes a blog under the name of ThinkinFyou got me thinking. That’s unusual because anyone who knows the least bit about me knows what a Herculean task it is to get me thinking about anything. Worrying, yes. Thinking, no. But never mind.

A little while back, ThinkinFyou wrote a post that included pictures of breasts (not, we are told, hers). The photos included a man’s exceptionally well padded, saggy chest and National Geographic-type breasts, among others. As a result of that post, the blogging service she used put a screen up in front of her blog warning of potentially offensive material. Readers had to click past this screen to see her blog. ThinkinFyou has since moved to another blogging service.

In addition, one of the blog promotion services closed ThinkinFyou’s account, apparently without warning and without giving her the option of avoiding account cancellation by removing the material in question.

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The government today announced the formation of a sweeping, new regulatory agency that will oversee and govern the entire financial sector. Banks, stock brokerages, mortgage lenders, finance companies, hedge funds, mutual funds, asset management firms and insurance companies, among others, will all fall under the purview of this agency.

This new regulatory body will be called NOHAFCA (No One Has A Frigging Clue Agency). Its mandate is to design and implement regulations that will attempt to limit or, better yet, eliminate the financial sector’s excesses, management mistakes, accountability shortcomings and governance failures that were major causes of the current economic meltdown.

Within the scope of the laws duly passed by the government, NOHAFCA will have broad powers to create and enforce any regulations that it considers to be in the best interest of consumers, businesses, taxpayers and the financial industry itself.

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I hate spam comments. I’m not too thrilled about comments that are solely abusive either. Still, apart from those varieties, I love getting relevant comments that refer to the content of a post or, if the comments go off on a tangent, to the content of the comments. They show me that, much to my utter amazement, there are people who read my crap rather than just surfing here, possibly by mistake, and leaving without reading.

In addition, because I usually respond to legitimate comments, they allow me to enter into a dialog with readers. This permits me to fool myself into believing that I have a life. Self-deception is nothing to be sneered at.

In the interest of figuring out how to solicit more comments, I recently scanned my old posts looking for the ones that garnered the greatest number of responses.

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This is a quick note to retailers in my area. Everyone else, feel free to leave and do something that, unlike my blog, stands some remote chance of being the slightest bit enjoyable and/or productive.

Retailers, are you are about to hold a huge, massive, immense, colossal, gargantuan, gigantic, and all other synonyms of really big VIP sale? Is the sale solely for very special customers? Do you want to invite me to your VIP-only sale?

If so, don’t send me my invitation using unaddressed mail that goes to every household on every mail route in a 50 mile radius of your store. Call me cynical if you must—you’d be speaking the truth—but your invitation distribution method leads me to question whether you actually do consider me to be an important person, let alone an very important one. It also leads me to question your overall sincerity. I’m just saying.

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I’m 56 and single. All things considered—my many neuroses being among those things to consider, the chances of me finding a woman with whom I’m likely to be able to enter into a romantic relationship are bleak at the moment. I use the word “bleak” in the sense of the prospects of survival being a tad bleak for someone stuck in a spaceship that got too close to the sun and is now being pulled inexorably by the sun’s overpowering gravity into that gargantuan, super-searing cauldron of uncontrolled nuclear fusion.

Nevertheless, unrealistic though I may be, I haven’t given up all hope for female companionship and, hopefully, more than solely companionship. I would, therefore appreciate any advice I can get.

For example, I’ve heard that some women are turned on by men who cook for them. If you’re one of those women, I need a little clarification: Would food poisoning spoil the mood for you or are you OK with that? I’m not very good in the kitchen.

This probably marks me as a very sick individual, but I get a kick out of life’s big and little ironies. For example:

• I suffer from uncontrollable giggles when the workers at a union’s headquarters go on strike. What happens if the bargainers for the striking union office workers go on strike at the same time? Where would it all end?

• Chuckling is also the order of the day when city transit workers complain about inadequate employee parking facilities. Um, maybe they should think about taking public transit to work. It’s just a thought.

• I don’t want anyone to think that I am unsympathetic toward other people’s misery, so I sometimes risk internal injuries trying, not always successfully, to stifle my guffaws when I read about a disaster that strikes a particularly pious religious institution. I guess they weren’t praying hard enough. Either that or god was in a really bad mood that day.

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I often get to wondering how objects that have been around for a long time were invented. A lot of things that seem natural to us now must have, at one time, seemed totally bizarre to everyone but the inventor. So how did the idea pop into someone’s head?

As an aside, I should note that, despite these questions entering my mind, I rarely, if ever, undertake any research to try to find the answers. Doing so would require that I forfeit my “Laziest SOB on the Planet” award. I cherish that honor.

For some reason that I can’t fathom, one of the things that I recently had such thoughts about is a horseshoe. That’s a weird item for me to think about because I consider myself to be a committed urbanite. Others consider me to be an urbanite who should be committed, but that’s another story for another time. The point is, I have not spent much time around horses.

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