every letter started broken hearted


Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Coney Island 1995, by Annie Leibovitz

* BBC lists 100 things we didn't know this time last year. excerpt:

5. 52% of households have five or more remote controls.

12. Ronald Reagan started planning his own funeral the year he entered the White House almost quarter of a century ago. He died in June.

26. The full names of Scooby Doo's Mystery Inc members are: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Scooby "Scoobert" Doo. Shaggy is actually Norville Rogers.

33. Bob Dylan originally planned to use his first two given names, Robert Allen, as his stage name, because it sounded like the name of a Scottish king. After he saw some Dylan Thomas poems, he chose Dylan as his new surname instead.

63. Just one in a hundred workers goes to the pub for their lunch, according to a study. The same proportion spend lunch having sex.

87. One gigabyte of information - about a quarter of the memory of an iPod mini - is the equivalent of a pick-up truck load of paper.

94. A cruise ship can put more than 130,000 litres of sewage into the sea each day.

* From the January 2005 edition of Harper's:

-- Number of House members in 1979 who voted against making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday: 133

-- Number who are still in the House: 9

-- Number who are vice-president: 1

-- Percentage of Pentagon contracts since 1998 that have been awarded on a no-bid basis: 44

-- Rank of Wal-Mart among Mexico's largest private employers: 1