Sir, – A line I have often had reason to state in recent years, which contains embedded wisdom from many of my teachers as I was growing up, regarding jumping into lakes, is that “just because some eejit on the internet did something doesn’t make it a good idea”.
Donald Clarke’s recent entertaining article on the celebrity trend of “raw-dogging” has lead me to add a corollary to the basic principle (“Even the properly hard have been drawn into raw-dogging”, Culture, August 17th).
The practice involves those who are, or would be, famous posting on social media that they have completed airline flights without any entertainment – no films, books or music. They just stare into space or watch the flight-tracker.
What is laudable about staring blankly is not clear to me, nor why in particular one should wait to be airborne in order to do so.
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I was curious to look up what the claims made were precisely, and so Googled those involved. One individual purported to have only watched a “flight map” on a 15-hour flight to Melbourne. Interestingly, he claimed to have counted “to a million twice”. That’s tricky.
If you counted one number per second, counting to a million takes over 11 days. And how you can go faster than one per second on, say, the 10 numbers after 367,670, I can’t fathom. It takes me 25 seconds to count the next 10. To count to a million once in 15 hours you’d need to get through almost 20 numbers per second. Which you can’t do, obviously.
So I’m extending the rule slightly – just because some eejit on the internet claims to have done something doesn’t make it a good idea. In fact, it doesn’t even mean he did it. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.