The newspaper headline jumped out at me like an elderly man rising from a bush to flash a group of startled nuns: “Study finds most mammals need 21 seconds to urinate.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Not at the time frame — 21 seconds is about what I’d have guessed — but at the absurdity of some studies.

Dwarfing that absurdity is the reckless statistics they often quote to reinforce so-called “facts.” Here’s one: “There’s an estimated 10 stars for every grain of sand on earth.”

Well, who did the counting? Even though it’s just an estimate, it plays pretty fast and loose with credible boundaries of speculation.

Space has never particularly interested me, because like magic tricks, it’s too mind-boggling to begin wrapping my brain around, and here’s another spacey estimate I question: “The universe is composed of possibly 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. One star, Epsilon, is so large that if it were hollow, it could contain more than 2.5 billion of our suns.”

More than? Are ya sure it’s not slightly less than? If you can’t be more exact, don’t bother me with information.

I much prefer concrete facts from comic strips, like in “Pickles” where I learned that a human nose never stops growing. Interesting, but troubling to me on so many levels.

No wonder my dad grew his first mustache in his 60s. I also prefer odd facts conveyed by relatives, so I can question.

My niece Amber tells me the Dead Sea is the only body of water where a rock won’t sink. Apparently there’s so much salt, everything rises.

Did she just make this up to sound intelligent? I prefer to think not, but I’ll test it on my next vacation to the Middle East.

Here’s another “relative truth” from my brother Jess’ sister-in-law Sue, that I really question: “The most common cause of sports-related trips to the ER is pingpong injuries.”

Now, Sue’s a fine gal with integrity I don’t question, (she swears the answer won her a radio call-in contest) but pingpong? Even more than croquet or foosball?

The reason the subject came up was because my nephew Jay had severely torn up his knee playing pingpong at his house. And my brother Paul last year re-tore his rotator cuff playing foosball on break at his office. Probably wise that no one in our fragile family rock climbs!

Now, if I read some wild claim in the Bible, I tend to be a little less skeptical. Did you know that in ancient Middle Eastern times, oddly shaped bottles were kept by wives as “tear catchers?”

When a husband went off to war, his wife would collect her tears for him in a bottle. Upon his return, she would hand him the bottled proof of her tears. (Hey, you can’t make this stuff up)!

But things like: “80 percent of all life on earth is found in the seas,” I find dubious and wildly speculative.

There again, it would be tough to accurately count, even for the most diligent number-crunchers.

And according to the American Holistic Health Federation, “People who aren’t satisfied with their lives increase their chance of premature death by 10 percent.”

Really? What, did they poll people after their deaths? Unless we’re talking suicide, I’ll dispute those numbers till the day I die.

While also not questioning God’s integrity, I do question some Christian interpretations. In Acts, Peter reminds a questioning crowd of all the Old Testament prophecies Jesus had fulfilled.

Could it be he’s just one of many throughout history who have coincidentally fit the prophetic fingerprint?

“Not a chance,” responded Louis Lapides, a Christian convert from Judaism. “Someone did the math and estimated that the probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled is one chance in 100 million billion.

“If you took this number of silver dollars, they would cover the state of Texas to a depth of 2 feet,” Lapides said

“If you marked one silver dollar among them and then had a blindfolded person wander the whole state to search for that exact coin, what would be the odds he’d find it?” he said. “It’s the same odds that anybody in history could have fulfilled just eight of the prophecies.”

Ya don’t say, Louis? Listen, that kind of outrageous embellishment might fly in Judaism circles, but we Christians tend to take a dim view!

Now, my eye doctor, James Bell, insists the odds of two close friends not only having the same rare cornea disease of keratoconus, but also having interchangeable contact lens’ at over one in a million.

Yet I borrowed a discarded contact lens from Dave Beemer about 10 years ago and I’m still wearing it today. Now that I clearly see as miraculous.