Land of Twins – The Weird Side of the Internet

Land of Twins – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I had a set of twins in my school growing up. The Mitchells. If you’re reading this, fellas, here’s to ya. They were cool, I don’t remember them that much though. But aside from my fourth-grade teacher Missus Galitelli telling me that I shared a birthday with Einstein, I don’t remember much of any of grade school. But twins, you remember.

So imagine an eighth grade graduation in a Needham, Massachusetts school that had 23 sets of twins strolling cap and gown? I mean, their average class is 450 kids, but that’s still three times higher than average.

A few facts are in order. Twins make up three percent of the population. Identical twins, the chance among twin births is one third, straight shot. That’s when the embryo splits and, like cloning, two exact copies grow. Fraternal twins are more common, which is just two embryos sharing a cozy studio. Twins, either way, are far more common than triplets, quadruplets, and ‘octomom’ situations. Most babies born that survived? Nine, to a woman from Mali. Guinness world record.

So twenty three sets of twins. Forty six kids out of four-fifty. Ten percent. Like I said, three percent is the average. So what gives?

Let’s take the obvious out of the picture because it’s no fun. There’s nothing saying the three percent is evenly dispersed over the world, so there will be pockets like this, and whole stretches with no twins. See? Boring. And why does the idea of mass amounts of twins in one place weird, but miles and miles with no twins to be found just normal? For the same reason lumpy oatmeal’s only a problem at the lumps. I don’t know.

So let’s talk cool reasons. So, okay, this starts out bad, but a certain megalomaniac in the ‘40s did experiments on twins. Maybe Needham, Massachusetts is the remnants of an ultra-secret experiment. Maybe there’s a fountain of twins, much like a fountain of youth, but every parent told their kids never to drink from it, and twenty three people rebelled.

I’m leaving alien impregnation out. Probes don’t do that. They just probe and play The BeeGees.

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