The “most admired people of the 20th century,” compiled by the Gallup Organization:
Only three nations have not switched officially to the metric system: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.
It’s already shaping up to be an eventful election year. Among the candidates for governor of Minnesota is Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, a self-proclaimed vampire and satanist.
If elected, Sharkey promises to impale terrorists and pedophiles on the grounds of the state capitol. His Vampires, Witches, and Pagans Party is officially recognized by the United States Federal Election Committee, and he announced his candidacy on Friday, Jan. 13.
His campaign slogan is “A New Deal for Minnesota.”
In China you can send money to your dead relatives. “Hell banknotes” are burned in a traditional ceremony, after which dead ancestors can use them to bribe the king of hell for a shorter stay.
They’re starting to use credit cards.
Excerpts from 112 Gripes About the French, a handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French after the Liberation:
The Stone Age isn’t quite over — not everywhere. On North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal lives a tribe of about 250 people, the Sentinelese, who have remained so hostile to contact with outsiders that their society is almost entirely free of modern influences.
They have no agriculture, subsisting through hunting, fishing and gathering plants. It’s not even clear whether they can produce fire without an external source like lightning.
The Indian government has made overtures by leaving gifts, but the warlike Sentinelese drove them off. Earlier this year, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who came too close to the island. Their bodies still haven’t been recovered — even a helicopter sent to retrieve them was driven off by arrows.
Judge Learned Hand on the U.S. income tax code, writing in the Yale Law Journal, December 1947:
In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax … merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception — couched in abstract terms that offer [me] no handle to seize hold of [and that] leave in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
Even Albert Einstein, who died trying to find a generalized theory of gravitation, wrote, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
Countries with compulsory voting:
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Fiji, Greece, Honduras, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mexico, Nauru, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela
Jonathan Swift’s “Resolutions — When I Come to Be Old”:
Remember the Y2K crisis? We thought society was going to collapse because we hadn’t trained our computers for the future.
Well, it’s going to happen again. We’re going to run out of Social Security numbers.
Your number is unique; it’s not recycled when you die. About a billion numbers are possible, but we’ve been assigning them since 1936 and we’ve already used up about a third of the possibilities. According to some estimates we could run out by 2075.
What happens then? Who knows? But if our government collapses, head to South Korea: Their social security numbers give access to online video games.