on the moon nothing grows
or ever dies


Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2000

* From Harper's October 2007:

-- Percentage change since 1990 on the average size of an American master bathroom: +50

-- Percentage change since 1980 in the average amount of solid waste generated by an American: +24

-- Number of Wal-Mart employees on whom the company secretly took out life insurance policies from 1993 to 1995: 350,000

-- Head of cattle that Fidelity Investments keeps on a portion of its corporate campus near Fort Worth: 25

-- Amount in taxes it thereby saves each year through a Texas "agricultural" exemption: $328,000

-- Minimum number of books about the Iraq war published in the United States so far: 835

-- Number of these that are children's books: 32

-- Number of copies a book of poems must sell per week to make the Poetry Foundation's bestseller list: 50

-- Number of different reasons for having sex, as identified this year in a University of Tesas study: 237

-- Number of escort services and McDonald's restaurants, respectively, in Washington, DC: 26, 23

* Andy Warhol in a Japanese ad for TDK tapes.

* "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken