I LIKE numbers. I always have, and probably always will. During car trips as a kid instead of listening to the latest New Kids on the Block or MC Hammer tape I'd glance out the window and keep track of the mile markers as they whizzed by and then look at the speedometer to try and figure out how long until we arrived at our destination. Laugh if you must, but the other day the Drudge Report (the secret Web site where conservatives plot to take over the world) mentioned that Wal-Mart had sold $1.52 billion worth of "stuff" the day after Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Black Friday. Think about it for a second: a single chain of stores sold more goods in one day than the annual GDPs of Grenada, Eritrea and Liberia combined! What other crazy Christmas facts and figures were lying out there unread or undiscovered ... I decided to have a little look.
$27,800 -- Touted as a "UNIQUE AND GREAT CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING," the 2004 Topps (baseball card company) American Treasures cut signature card of Thomas Jefferson recently sold for this sum on eBay. It's essentially a cheap piece of cardboard with a little strip of paper with Jefferson's signature, and it sold for $27,800. We attend "Mr. Jefferson's University" so this place is probably crawling with random stuff Jefferson signed. All I've got to say is the new Special Collections Library better have a really sophisticated alarm system.
1 -- The current box office ranking of the movie "Bad Santa" after the film grossed more than $16.8 million in its opening weekend. The film chronicles the adventures of Willie, an angry and discontented drunk who reappears every Christmas season in a different city as a department store Santa. "Bad Santa" features the use of the "f-word" an astounding 147 times, which is more than the word has been used in all Christmas movies combined, ever.
0 -- Number of times you'll see a Christian nativity scene in a New York City public school after the city banned the displays in its schools. Somehow Jewish menorahs and Islamic crescents are allowed but Christian nativity scenes are not because "a depiction of the birth of Christ does not represent a historical event." As much as I didn't want to make this a political column, this is absolutely outrageous; New York City has banned Christmas.
14,300,000,000,000,000,000 -- Amount of joules of energy absorbed per second by each of Santa's lead reindeers as estimated by Richard Waller in his 1990 Spy Magazine piece "Is There A Santa Claus." The article is as silly as it is scientific, but Waller posits that Santa will be hauling 353,000 tons of toys pulled by 214,200 reindeer traveling at 650 miles per second. The long and short of it is the sleigh, Santa and all the reindeer would be vaporized within a fraction of a second. So if you have young kids and you're reading this, kindly place your paper in the trash when done.
11 to 25 percent -- Probability, as determined by the National Climatic Data Center, that there will be at least one inch of snow on the ground on Christmas day in Charlottesville. So the next time the 'Hoos are getting pummeled by Duke in basketball or FSU in football, take solace in the fact that both Durham and Tallahassee have less than a 5 percent chance of a white Christmas.
No. 2 -- Saving the best for last, this is the current rank of the search term "Christmas" on Lycos' Top 50 Searches for last week. Shockingly, the No. 1 search term on Lycos last week was Paris Hilton. For those who know, this is extremely sad (and funny); for those who don't, ask your closest guy friend. The whole Top 50 list is a sad statement about society in general: "Marijuana" ranked ahead of "the Bible," "Dragonball" beat "baseball" and "Harry Potter" was higher than "Tupac Shakur."
Merry Christmas, and have a happy New Year!
(Joe Schilling's column usually appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jschilling@cavalierdaily.com.)
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