Countdown From 817 Million To One

 That's it. That is the approximate number. 

Of what you ask?

Of the average person's chances of being killed by a shark.

Of the average person's chances of winning an Academy Award in any of the acting categories.

Of the average person's chances of writing a book that will become required reading in a classroom.

Of the average person's chances of being the sole winner of a lottery jackpot worth over 200 million (after taxes).

Of the average person's chances of being fluent in Liki. Liki is an Austronesian language spoken only on the island of Liki, one of the 17,000 islands that make up the Indonesian archipelago.

Of the average person's chances of winning a gold medal in the Olympics...for surfing (yes, surfing is an Olympic sport).

There may be a few people who question the validity of the above listed events occurring within the oddly specific range of 817 million against listed here, so allow me to assure you they are all completely unverifiable (literally, I just now made them up based upon my perception of how probable each of them might be based on the planet's current population exceeding 7.7 billion divided by supposed (to me) occurrence of each.

Which, therefore means they are as legitimate as any paranormal investigator's claim to have seen a ghost or any  psychotherapist's claim of unlocking repressed memories or the torsion field hypothesis.

So yeah, all of those admittedly false statements I wrote are as legitimate as several other unproven (or even frequently scientifically disproved) things hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, fervently believe. 

Maybe I should start writing for the Enquirer or Weekly World News.

NOTE: I might be way off about the death-by-shark odds.