10 TRUE THINGS YOU PROBABLY WON'T BELIEVE

Feel free to respond to this blog at www.DC42eric@hotmail.com...

To the reader who commented, half-jokingly, that having a girlfriend has "whipped me" and causes me to do "a half-ass, two paragraph blog", I retort that I'll be happy to read her thorough, lovingly crafted blog whenever she gets around to posting one.

So now enjoy this half-ass, notes & trivia style blog entry:

Fact #1
Iraq (or more properly at the time, Mesopotamia) is believed by ancient historians to be the birthplace of the zero, the foundation of modern math. (Contrary to the opinion of many liberals, zero is actually at least five points lower than the IQ of President Bush.)

Fact#2
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, did NOT free all the slaves. He freed the slaves in the rebelling Confederate states via the Emancipation Proclamation--territories over which he technically no longer had jurisdiction.

Fact 3
It's true: Detroit Pistons forward Tayshaun Prince's idol while playing high school and a year of college basketball--Kobe Bryant. Prince is 23 years old. Bryant is 25. Source: ABC Sports

Fact 4
The most recent study culled from U.S. Department of Labor statistics indicates that women have reached the highest pay rate relative to men in U.S. history...they now on average make about 75 cents for every dollar a man makes for the same job.

Fact 5
It's not just a bad Saturday Night Live skit--for at least a couple of years in the late 1960's, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton and Howard Dean were all simultaneously students at Yale University.

Fact 6
The largest landholders in the United Kingdom are the royal family and the Church of England. The largest landholders in the U.S. are the Federal government and the Catholic Church. (Just what were we running away from in the 17th and 18th centuries again?)

Fact 7
There are now at least six times as many casualties in the Iraq War and Occupation than occurred in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and twice as many casualties as occurred in the first year in Vietnam (1964-65).

Fact 8
The average cost of a Hollywood studio film in 2003 was over $44 million. In 1980, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate was called by many the biggest box office disaster of all time. It cost around $45 million, a record at the time. Sources: Daily Variety and my memory.

Fact 9
The cicadas currently mating in a cacophanous fashion across much of the Eastern and Southern states only emerge every 17 years and only live for a few weeks, leaving their eggs in the ground to begin the whole cycle again in 17 more years. (As an aside, I too once went 17 years without getting laid, but unfortunately lived to tell about it.) Source: NPR Radio

Fact 10
If Senator John Kerry is elected President, he will be the first president born in the State of Colorado and the only president born in a state that joined the union after the Civil War (1876).

This was fun. Until next time...

(Source material from The World Almanac, except where noted. Most of the comments in the parenthesis, if you haven't noticed, are the opinion of this blogger.)

Quote of the Week
"Relationships are like sharks--if they don't keep moving forward, they die."
---Woody Allen in Annie Hall