Possibly like many readers, I find that one of life’s minor aggravations can be stumbling across the occasional item in the morning newspaper that piques my interest, only to abruptly leave me high and dry with a slew of unanswered questions for company.

These things should properly come with a “Reader Beware: Some Assembly Required” warning. If the reader wishes to learn anything concerning the subject at hand he is going to have to do whatever heavy lifting may be required to enlighten himself. Given that choice, I will of course remain unenlightened, as my heavy-lifting days are pretty much history.

An example of the genre would be the trivia feature that was included in the weather page package in Monday’s newspaper. The question: “Are men or women struck more often by lightning?” The answer: “Men, by a ratio of 5 to 1.”

Granted, the format for the daily weather question does not allow for a detailed explanation in the answer. If it’s details I want, I am not going to find them in pursuit of trivia buried in some newspaper’s innards. Still, if ever a statement cried out for the extended treatment of additional information it would seem to be this one of Monday past.

“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive,” Mark Twain wrote. “But it’s lightning that does the work.” And now we see the wisdom in the old humorist’s assertion. By a ratio of 5 to 1, men are struck by lightning more often than women are struck by lightning. But why such a disparity?

Certainly it can’t be a gender thing, can it? Some innate ability to ward off lightning strikes that the female of the species has wired into her genetic code and the male does not? And if it were, could I even mention it and not expect to get ridden out of town on a rail, a la the late president of Harvard and others who have suggested in public that there might be differences between the sexes?

Do men get zapped at such a rate because, while lightning is crackling all around them, they are more apt than women to be on a golf course with a golf club-turned-lightning-rod in their hands, focused only on getting off their next shot before the rain strikes? Probably not. As my favorite professional golfer Lee Trevino once famously observed, the best place to stand during a thunderstorm is in the middle of a fairway with a 1-iron in your hand, because not even God can hit a one-iron. And if He can’t hit the rarely seen 1-iron, chances are good that He can’t hit a 3-iron any better. Or any of the other clubs in His bag, for that matter.

Might the disproportionate number of lightning strikes involving men versus women have to do with men being more inclined than women to be outdoors at any given time, including during thunderstorms? Feeding the hawgs, plowing the back 40, flying a kite with a metal key attached, in emulation of Ben Franklin. That sort of thing. Or are women equally as outdoorsy, but simply not quite as dumb as men, their strong suit being knowing when to come in out of a storm?

I suppose it could be that males are just plain unlucky when it comes to the lightning thing. But that many times more so than females? Could that have been a typographical error there on the Monday morning weather page? Or do the figures stand up, and is what we have here some sort of divine plan for thinning the herd, a kind of bucks-only culling program to be employed when things get out of whack?

These are some of the questions that spring to mind when I read an unelaborated statement such as the one in the weather trivia box. But asking the questions brings me no closer to having the answers, and so I humbly beseech the heavy thinkers amongst my loyal readership to give me their take on the deal.

If you have even the merest of clues as to why men, by a 5-to-1 ratio, are more apt to get struck by lightning than women, please let me know in a hundred electrifying words or so, and I’ll run the picks of the litter here at some point down the line.

Perhaps together we can catch lightning in a bottle and solve this nagging mystery for the benefit of mankind. Without having to hold aloft a 1-iron while standing in the middle of a golf course fairway.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.