It's #MayThe4th, AKA Star Wars Day, and fans around the world are coming out of isolation to share tributes to their favourite characters.
Some of those tributes are funny, some are touching, and most are deeply nerdy. Take for example this tweet by Malaysian health professional Dr. Jemilah Mahmood, who attempted to combine a Star Wars tribute with advice for the COVID-19 crisis.
Then there's the Australian Bureau of Statistics' contribution, which is genuinely just baffling.
On Twitter, the ABS marked the occasion with a graphic titled "May the Labour Force be with you!", which claims to answer the question of "which occupation would your favourite Star Wars character work in if they lived among us?"
The graphic then draws on Census data to reveal the number of Australians who currently work in those occupations. Congratulations, then, to Australia's 39,860 security officers, whom the ABS has decided are basically the equivalent of stormtroopers, the indoctrinated shock troops who serve the villains of the Star Wars series.
And look, perhaps many Australians do find it fascinating to learn that R2D2 would be one of Australia's 1770 aircraft engineers if he was at work on earth today. But the ABS social media team's choice of Star Wars Day stats this year is a little odd, given that the bureau actually has some genuinely relevant statistics on file.
In fact, for the past couple of years the ABS has reliably used May 4th to update Australia on the number of people reporting "Jedi" as their religion in the Census.
And while the number of Jedi is declining, it's still more than you might expect. As of the 2016 Census, Jedi numbers in Australia had fallen to 47,741, down from 70,509 in 2001.
I guess we'll need to wait another year for our next official ABS Jedi count. In the meantime, at least "May the Labour Force be with you" is a better pun than this effort from NSW Police:
