Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
Interact
Random
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
Willett's Wager
Exotheology
Willett's Wager 2001
UFOs
Missionaries
Fashionable People
There's Nowt as Queer as Folk
Paedophilia is Not a Crime
The Future Does Not Suck
How to Win the Lottery without buying a ticket
Meatheads, Slobs and Pencil Necked Geeks
Is Equality Possible?
Circumcision
Does God Bless America?
Chick Food
The Great American Blow Job
Should Adultery be Illegal?
Consent Matters
23 sperm curry
I had heard the story before. It seemed like a classic variation on an urban legend set around one of the perennial themes “you’ll never guess what the health inspectors found when they went to that Chinese/Indian restaurant/take away last month”
23 types of sperm. The mind boggles. And so it should. There is something very fishy about that number. How could anybody seriously believe that 23 waiters and cooks would stand around and masturbate into a pan or plate of curry? It is simply not credible. Massive overkill and so unnecessary. Spitting into food has been known to occur for decades and no doubt every bodily fluid or not so fluid waste has been applied to the plate of the obnoxious customer. (My mind goes back to age 14, and Nigel Baignton giving a whole new meaning to the phrase boiling the kettle…) However the usual Indian waiters response to racist abuse is to inform the cook who ensures that a quintuple dose of spices is added and the obnoxious customer is challenged to eat it through playing on his machismo and racial pride. This process has started an arms race of sorts and the curry houses of Newcastle and Leicester in particular have had to invent new dishes to cater for the warped tastes of their drunken clientele. The vindaloo (from the Portuguese for garlic wine) has transmogrified into the lethal tindaloo which is subject to its own sub-section in the draft version of the new chemical and biological weapons treaty.
At this point (working on my laptop) I get a new older version of the same meme/urban legend passed on to me. It is just not credible however personally it is attributed. The same basic story emerges, woman eats curry and after violently vomiting and being taken to hospital traces of sperm are found in the vomit. Why would a doctor notice sperm in vomit and why would he report it? Why is it always a woman “victim”? Why does the city change but never the nature of the food? Why does the number 23 occur so often? The answer to the 23 riddle is simple biology, 23 chromosomes in a human sperm. Could this story actually be based on one ancestral real incident? If so, who do you think is most likely to be the donor of the sperm, the man who made the curry or the man who paid for it?
I can imagine that it is possible that a laboratory technician could have found sperm in a sample of vomit, tested it and found it was of human origin (23 chromosomes) and so this figure could have put on an incident sheet and some scientific illiterate (one of the proud 95%) could have taken this figure to mean the sperm of 23 different men. How much better is that story than the probable original, poor general hygiene causes a woman to throw up her curry and the remnants of her payment for it. Of course there is no reason for any such story to have a genuine basis in fact. Most people who re-tell the story have never met the person who first told it and so have no way of judging how plausible it was. With time like any meme those bits which add to the likelihood of it being retold will be favoured and those bits which do not help are lost. So cities change, dates change (always keeping up to 18 months of the present) and precise locations and people change. I have it on good authority that two distinct restaurants are the original source, both on a busy main road near other restaurants that might cloud the issue of precise identity, but several miles apart.
I have asked an expert on the subject of swallowing sperm for an opinion of how likely it is to cause vomiting and he gives the response I expected. “It never has that effect on me, and I should know.”
How could a figure of 23 different kinds of sperm emerge? Blood grouping? DNA finger printing? Surely such laboratories would have better things to do with their time and money.
The much more likely source of the story is the simple one of somebody making it up in order to discredit the type (race) of people running the particular restaurant, to prove a point. Like any parable the details are entirely fictional but designed to be generally plausible. Most times the story is passed on in what passes for good faith, the person telling the story knows who told them (or who they heard talking to somebody else) and they think they know which restaurant it happened in. The endless story only needs a minority of liars to be kept fresh and relevant. Some of the changes through time will happen spontaneously with no need for any form of deliberate manipulation, many others will be minor tweaks given in the course of passing the tale on to a new audience, an older man may take five years off the age of his anecdote or change it to a different city, another may switch the target from Chinese to Indian or vice versa. These days there is also the tendency to make McDonalds, Burger King or KFC the target, with a big corporation standing in for the distrusted minority, fulfilling the role of victim of lies that are somehow more important and deeply true than mere factual accounts of actuality.
Of course an entire film has been made about the number 23 and its apparent cosmic significance. What can we say about it? It is a prime number, one of the larger ones that are often chosen as lottery numbers because they correspond with dates. It’s the door number of Tony Hancock. It sounds like the perfect answer to the question think of a number, apart from 69 or 42.