Statistical Summer Saturday

”Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

A day for fasab factoid fans. 

Here is a selection of statistics and odd facts that I hope you find interesting. 

If she were life-size Barbie's measurements would be 39-23-33

Coca-cola was originally green

The Hawaiian alphabet has 12 letters

The first novel ever written on a typewriter was "Tom Sawyer"

Why do you need a driver's license to buy liquor in America when you can't drink and drive?

There are more collect calls on Father's Day than any other day of the year

Heinz Catsup leaving the bottle travels at 25 miles PER YEAR

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs

Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?

Men get hiccups more often than women

Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear better

The chances that an American lives within 50 miles of where he/she grew up are 1 in 2.

The amount American Airlines saved in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class was $440,000

The city with the most Rolls Royces per capita is Hong Kong

The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work is Alaska

How does the guy who drives the snowplow get to work in the mornings?

The chances of a white Christmas in New York are 1 in 4

The portion of US annual rainfall that falls in April is 1/12

28 percent of Africa is wilderness

38 percent of North America is wilderness

An estimated 44 percent of American adults go on a diet each year

43 percent of Americans regularly attend religious services

The city with the highest per capita viewership of TV evangelists is Washington DC

80 percent of American men say they would marry the same woman if they had it to do all over again

50 percent of American women say they would marry the same man

58 percent of men say they are happier after their divorce or separation

85 percent of women say they are happier

Hallmark makes cards for 105 different familial relationships

The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour is 61,000

70 percent of Americans have visited Disneyland or Disney World

The average life span of a major league baseball is 7 pitches

1/3 of all ice cream sold is vanilla

1/3 of potatoes sold are French-fried

7 percent of Americans eat at McDonalds each day

90 percent of bird species are monogamous

3 percent of mammal species are monogamous

Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?

If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors?

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"You're An Asshole!"

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”



I should make it clear right at the start of this blog post that the person who was being accused of being an asshole was ME!


Of course, you know from reading my blog that such a description could never be applied to me ….ahem, however, a while back I had somehow managed to get my name on an “idiot” list of people who could be called about various scams and “investments”. 


I suspect that one of those companies that would never sell your details, sold my details.


Well, as an unwanted consequence, I had cold callers by the square yard for a while.


Oil was the thing to be in.
No, it was commodities futures.
Had I invested in ETFs?
No, wait,  currency trading was far better.
Nope colored diamonds was even better than that.
Shale oil, natural gas, copper reserves, opal mines......


And on and on and on and on it went for several months.

At the start I listened politely. I’ve had to cold call people on a few occasions myself and I know what a horrible job it is, so I answered their inane questions, pretended I was vaguely interested in what they had to say, but eventually declined all their more than generous offers. 


Man, if only I had done a few of those investments I would have been richer than Bill Gates by now – or broke a lot faster!


But as the weeks went on, a bit like the telemarketers I wrote about in the cunningly titled "Telemarketers" my patience ran out. I started to say up front that I wasn’t interested and couldn’t afford it and if they couldn’t take that hint, I hung up.


However there was one particularly unpleasant young guy who worked for an investment brokerage in New York. He probably had never made it farther than Manhattan in his life, but he was an authority about everything, about everything, about everything. You know the type. And like most people so endowed he actually knew hardly anything at all.


So one day he phoned me up. I must have been at a bit of a lose end (before my blogging days!) so I listened to what he had to say. He had spoken to me before, but didn’t remember, so I knew his patter and what was coming and therefore was well prepared with my answers.


Was I interested in investing? Yes, absolutely.


Had I ever invested in the stock market before? Yes, indeed I had.


Had I any stocks at the moment? Well, no, not at the moment. I’ve been waiting on a “really great deal” to come along.


Of course, I knew he had a “really great deal”.


“Terrific!” he said. “Because I am about to offer you a really great deal!”


Am I psychic or what?

Naturally I got a little excited at this wonderful news and wanted more details, like pronto!


Ah, but first he had a bit on his cold call sheet to quality investors.


What kind of amount was I comfortable with? How much did I normally invest?


I knew this would be where the fun would really start. So I said that it depended on the deal, if it was good enough then it could be a decent amount.


That wasn’t good enough. He wanted to quantify it.


“Would you be comfortable with something in the $5000 range?” he asked.


“Not really,” I said, then hearing him deflate on the other end of the phone I followed with, “No, if I’m interested, and there’s no guarantee that I am because you haven’t told me anything about this investment, it would have to be a much bigger amount than that.”


Almost immediately I could hear the vacuum pump activating and re-inflating him.


Now he was sure he had hooked a whale, but tugging on his line was just the big bunch of crap I was giving him.
Then he told me what the investment was. Some pharmaceutical company that was about to go into orbit once a new drug they were working had been perfected and FDA approved and all that rigmarole.


If you don’t know about these things, firms like these who cold call hyping some obscure share or other are on a BIG percentage of the price they get. Could be as high as 75% in some cases. The shares are usually completely worthless and virtually unsaleable on the open market so if you are foolish enough to buy them you are stuck with them and the chances of the company coming good are millions to one. Better to buy a few lottery tickets. 


So he could do me a great deal on these shares. They had been trading at up to 90 cents a few months ago (on IMDAQ I presumed, that’s the imaginary stock exchange) but his company had managed to secure some at a fraction of that price. If I were to invest say $50,000 I could get them at 30 cents.


Boy was I interested?


No, not in the slightest, but I didn’t tell him that.


What I said was something like, “Yeah that sounds okay, but for that level of investment is that really the best you could do. What if I could get a few friends interested and maybe raise $100,000? Could you sweeten the deal on your end?”


I got the feeling that this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to this idiot. He could hardly contain himself.


He talked and he talked and he better talked.


Unsurprisingly he could sweeten the price a little for that level of investment and the price duly came down to 25 cents per share.


I wasn’t very impressed. I asked for a better deal.


This time he would have to consult his supervisor to see if he could get a better deal on the share price, so the line went dead for a couple of minutes and then back he came, 23 cents was the best he could do.


“So that’s 434,782 shares for the $100,000?” I asked. Our calculators agreed the number.


“It’s good,” I told him, “But for that sort of cash I would need at least half a million shares, probably more.”


“Let’s not play games,” he said, ready to make another counter offer.


“Why not?” I asked. “I like playing games.”


“Huh?”


“Yeah!”


“You like playing games?” he asked, a little confused. 


The penny was very close to the edge but it hadn’t quite dropped.


“Yeah, don’t you?” I answered happily. “This has been fun.”


“What? …..WTF? …..You mean you’re NOT interested?”


“Well I did say up front that there were no guarantees,” I reminded him.


“But?....  Why did….? ….”


Short pause.


Silence.


Sound of penny finally dropping.


Then, in a very high pitch girly kind of voice,

“You’re a f****** asshole!”


CLICK!!!


He was great fun. But, alas, he didn’t want to play any more because he never called again ;(

Never Hitch Your Wagon To Another Man’s Horse

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

Strangely this blog post is neither about wagons nor horses, but I thought the title was catchy. It is related though, I haven’t reached the stage yet where I have to deceive people into reading my blog.


This post is about Chief Petty Officer Roman Styles, U.S. Coast Guard Station, Jacksonville, Florida who decided to repair some damaged shingles on the roof of his house himself, instead of paying a contractor to do it for him.


Ever conscious about the dangers of working at heights and on sloping shingles in particular, Chief Petty Officer Styles tied a safety rope to the trailer hitch of his truck prior to climbing up on his steep roof. Then, once he had climbed up to the peak of his roof he secured the other end of the line around his waist and slid over the top of the roof to repair the shingles.


So far so good. 


He started his repairs.


As luck would have it, bad luck that is, shortly after he started to work, his teenage son called for a ride home from a Boy Scout trip. Mr Styles’ wife, Jane, took the call and went straight out of the house, got into the truck and yelled to her husband that she’d be back right away.


"I didn't see the rope," Mrs. Styles said later, "until I saw it in the rear-view mirror. By then I was half-way down the street."


Bill Schlimm, a next door neighbor, said, "I'll never forget the look on Roman's face as he came sailing over the peak of that house. If it hadn't been for that tall cedar tree he would have been really hurt."


After realizing what had happened, but not before she had dragged her poor husband quite a ways down the street, Mrs Styles summoned emergency help.


Mr Styles’ bad luck was compensated by the good luck that he only had to be treated for a slight concussion and a few scrapes and bruises. 

Willy And Woof!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.

I’ve always thought the shortened form of the name William was a curious one. If you turn out to be a big guy in later life, say 6 feet tall or better, then you’re fine, but if you happen to end up as closer to the 5 feet mark in stature then the name isn’t so good. Being called ‘Big Willy’ all the time must make for more of a confidence builder than being stuck all your life as ‘Small Willy’ or ‘Wee Willy’.

Fortunately women don’t seem to have the same problem, at least not since the name ‘Fanny’ has gone out of fashion.

This is all by way of introduction to a man I knew called, you’ve probably guessed already, ‘Willy’. He was just medium height and so everybody just called him ‘Willy’ -  to his face that is. Behind his back ‘Willy’ had another nick name.

Willy was a curious bloke. He was by far and away the most disobliging man I have ever had the misfortune to meet. And selfish and bad tempered as well. Everything was about him, what he wanted, and when he wanted it. Nobody else mattered.

And to top it all off, he was as dumb as they come. He never finished school or learned a trade. Any time he was employed it was only for a short while quite frankly because no one could stick his attitude for very long. If he was given a job to do he did it, but as reluctantly and as badly as possible and would never help out any of his colleagues – even when doing so would have helped himself.

Willy was also born with a cleft pallet sometimes known as a ‘hair lip’. In his day the surgical techniques for correcting such an infliction were not as advanced as nowadays and Willy ended up with a quite pronounced speech impediment for the rest of his life.

Eventually though he found a woman desperate enough to take him on and they got married. Her name was Ruth, a nice name. At least it was to everybody but ‘Willy’. For a short time after they were married he called her Ruth, naturally enough, that was her name. But then after a few weeks or months he changed her name (unofficially) to ‘Margaret’, which was not and had never been her name or part of it. But from then on to him she was ‘Margaret’, Ruth was no more.

It wasn’t because he didn’t like her real name, or because he had forgotten it, he wasn’t quite as stupid as that, I don’t think so anyhow. He had an entirely different reason.

It was also the time that ‘Willy’ became known to one and all in the district as “The Dog”.

You see, because of his affliction and consequent speech impediment, ‘Willy’ could not say the name ‘Ruth’ properly – why did he choose a woman with that name to begin with you ask? I think perhaps the number he had to choose from was very small.  

When he was out in company, or even just shouting around his own house or garden for his wife, in his head ‘Willy’ was saying ‘Ruth, Ruth’. But what the rest of us heard was only ‘Woof, Woof’.

Now I may be an evil person, I hope not, but this just cracked me up every time I heard it. One ‘Woof’ was funny enough, but when he put two or three of them together, ‘Woof, Woof, Woof’ it was just too much. Absolutely hilarious seeing and hearing this grown man walking about shouting ‘Woof’ like a demented dog. Hence the nickname he got lumbered with for the rest of his days.

Of course all the hilarity made him even crosser than he normally was and the situation was never helped when some of the local wits handed him a dog biscuit when he was in full flight, or tried to feel his nose to see if it was cold, to which he invariably replied ‘WTF’ or in ‘Willy’s’ case make that ‘WTH’!

And that was the tale of Willy and Woof!

Have you had similar experiences? Send them along. Let the world know what is happening before it is too late.

The Late, Great Mr. Harry Meadows

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

This week seems to be turning into a bit of a tribute week. Yesterday I paid tribute to Stephen Pile who was the worst founder of a club ever! Today I would like to take a little time to pay my tribute to Mr Harry Meadows.

I’ll come back to Harry in a moment. First a general comment. Old folk are peculiar at times. As I get older myself I understand more and more why. But despite my tolerance level for idiots heading inexorably towards zero, I’d like to think that even in my later years, if I am spared, I would retain my sense of humor. I would hate to just become another miserable old ‘git’.

Speaking of which, when one of my aunts died a lot of years ago, I was helping to make the funeral arrangements, part of which involved organizing the undertaker. When he arrived at the Nursing Home she had been staying in to do his thing I noticed that he was in a van and not a hearse.

Always curious, I asked him why this was the case. “Oh dear,” he said. “You have no idea. We were forced to buy the van for coming to places like this. If we arrived here in the hearse it caused so much distress and panic amongst the residents who all thought their time had come and we were there for them that the Home owners all demanded that we get a different form of transport or lose the business.” So now you know.

Back to Harry Meadows.

I have no doubt that most, if not all, of you will never have heard of Harry. He wasn’t a famous man, didn’t invent anything special, wasn’t a public personality, in fact he was just an ordinary person like the rest of us.

Except one thing he did have in common with me at any rate was a sense of humor, and one that was right on the edge.

Harry was a resident at an old peoples’ home in the 1960s. It was called the Haslemere Home for the Elderly and it was located in Great Yarmouth in Britain. Haslemere, at that time anyway, had the largest elderly population in the country.

The Home had first hit the headlines in September 1960, when another of the residents, 81 years young Gladys Elton, decided it would be good fun and would break the monotony of the place if she performed a striptease, which she duly did.

Unfortunately Gladys must have been hot stuff, too hot in fact, because the excitement she generated with her performance was too much for one of the male residents who as a result died of cardiac arrest. Five more of the inmates of the Home also had to be treated for shock.

Old Gladys must have been quite a ‘goer’!

So what about Harry Meadows?

Well Harry didn’t take part in the striptease, but the following year, in 1961, Harry who at the time was 87 years old, thought it would be funny if he dressed up as the Grim Reaper. He duly did so and then from outside the Home, peered through the windows complete with a scythe in hand.

Unfortunately Harry had an even bigger effect on the inmates than Gladys. This time three of them died of shock at seeing the Grim Reaper outside their window!

The Home was subsequently closed. I don’t know what happened to Harry.

Is this tragic or funny? To me it’s funny that it happened and tragic that there are not more people in the world like Gladys and Harry.