That’s a Fact, Jack
The Source
Too much information can be worrisome. I recently read that 1 in 50 Americans executed for murder had the middle name “Wayne.” I wonder if my parents considered this when they brought Kenneth Wayne into the world. I know that I would have been better off not knowing this. I’m all for freedom of the press, but sometimes I wish I’d not learned things like…well….On average, most people have fewer friends than their friends have. This is called the “friendship paradox.” I call it depressing. Some information doesn’t bother me at all, like the fact that Harry Houdini could pick up pins with his eyelashes and thread a needle with his toes. As long as he doesn’t do it at my table I could care less. That fact that Fred Baur, the designer of the Pringles can, had his ashes buried in one doesn’t phase me at all, but when I learned that you are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than any other day, I wish I’d closed the newspaper 14% earlier. Do we really need to know that people in Victorian England who couldn’t afford chimney sweeps would drop live geese down their chimneys instead? And it only depressed me to learn that the flashing clock on microwave uses up more electricity in a day than the heating element. When I learned that a medium-size cumulus cloud weighed the same as forty elephants I stayed indoors that day. Of course some things simply tickle me…like the fact that the Dyslexia Research Center is located in a town called Reading, or since Tonto means “stupid” in Spanish, when The Lone Ranger was shown in Latin America he was called Toro, “bull.” On her 120th birthday in 1977, Jeanne Calment became the oldest person ever recorded. She said, “I only have one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it.” Some are simply depressing: In 2012, Apple Inc. had more cash in the bank than the U.S. government. More than 7000 Americans die each year as a result of doctors’ bad handwriting, and China is the world’s largest supplier of Bibles. Dern. Until 1913, children in the U.S. could legally be sent by parcel post, there are 5.9 calories in a postage stamp, and the 10,000 trillion ants in the world weigh about the same as all the human beings. No, I’m not making these things up. And you’ve got to wonder why someone would even figure some things out, like the fact that if the 5 trillion spiders in the Netherlands took to eating humans rather than insects, they’d consume the entire Dutch population in just three days, and the fact that the US tax code is four times as long as the complete works of Shakespeare. Some things simply take you off guard. For example, that diamond on your finger is probably at least 3 million years old, and the fact that George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had their shoes hand-made by the same Italian shoemaker. One-third of Russians believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, and 46% of Americans believe that the world is less than 10,000 years old. And then there are the facts that simply wear you out to think about them: The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the world in a lifetime and the citizens of our planet spend 500,000 hours a day typing Internet security codes. Does anyone really care that the ozone layer smells faintly of geraniums or that one in ten European babies in conceived on an IKEA bed? Does it significantly change your life to know that 10% of all the photographs in the world were taken in the last 12 months or that Shostakovich wrote his 8th Symphony in a henhouse? And there are facts that simply put us in our place. If you earn over $21,000 you are among the richest 4% on the planet and if you reach your 40th birthday you’ve lived longer than most inhabitants of this planet. When I learned that Liechtenstein, the world’s 6th-smallest country is the world’s largest exporter of false teeth I was duly humbled. The fact that 10% of US electricity is made from dismantled Soviet atomic bombs should make us all thank God when we flip the light switch, although if the world current was suddenly cut off, all the batteries in the world store just 10 minutes worth of juice. And occasionally you run across some good news. Once upon a time nearly a quarter of everyone in Britain was named “Mary.” I guess I’ll settle for “Wayne.” p.s. In 2010, Ghana banned the sale of used underwear.