Full Moon has customers and staff howling

It's only Wednesday, but this week has been crazy.

Murphy's Law is everywhere, and folks are panicking over the smallest things. My usually successful requests for patience and rationality seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

I was scratching my head, wondering what was going on, when someone said...

"It must be the full moon."

And I knew they were correct.

Hear me out. That was not one of my usual tongue-in-cheek statements.

I wasn't kidding.

Numerous studies have been done on this subject with mixed results, but a recent study at the University of Miami really stands out.

"At the University of Miami, psychologist Arnold Lieber and his colleagues decided to test the old belief of full-moon “lunacy” which most scientists had written off as an old wives’ tale.

The researchers collected data on homicide in Dade County (Miami) over a period of 15 years — 1,887 murders, to be exact. When they matched the incidence of homicide with the phases of the moon, they found, much to their surprise, that the two rose and fell together, almost infallibly, for the entire 15 years.

As the full or the new moon approached, the murder rate rose sharply; it distinctly declined during the first and last quarters of the moon.

...researchers repeated the experiment using murder data from Cuyahoga County in Ohio (Cleveland). Again, the statistics showed that more murders do indeed occur at the full and new moons."

An earlier report by the American Institute of Medical Climatology to the Philadelphia Police Department entitled “The Effect of the Full Moon on Human Behavior” found similar results.

That report showed that the full moon marks a monthly peak in various kinds of psychotically oriented crimes such as murder, arson, dangerous driving, and kleptomania. People do seem to get a little bit crazier about that time of the month.

"Dr. Lieber speculates that perhaps the human body, which, like the surface of the earth, is composed of almost 80 percent water, experiences some kind of “biological tides” that affect the emotions. When a person is already on psychologically shaky ground, such a biological tide can push him or her over the edge."

During my college days, I held three jobs, one of which was at a mental hospital—I'm not kidding.

If you want to know whether there's something to this full moon theory, hang out at a mental hospital for a month. Most days are as quiet as any other hospital, but during the full moon, you be afraid to go anywhere alone.