Happy 21st and the Challenges of Doing Not Much

According to Blogger, this is my 21st posting that will be celebrated tonight with novacaine and joyous cavity filling at a cost of $210. Damn I need to figure out my new dental insurance. Continental Airlines has said that my wait on the phone will be 2 minutes, but 6 minutes later I am still typing to you instead, go figure. It seems that I have a job and a place at this company that I have been unwilling to like for a few months now, as is evident in the massive amount of French food that I was fed during lunch, but I can assure you that your trusty friend here has done nothing but read mediocre journalistic endeavors all day as 6pm rapidly approaches. With that said, I leave you with a quick story and some previously drafted material.

Sometime 8 to 10 months ago people at the once cool company I worked for were talking about drugs (bad). I mentioned that the inventor of LSD had just turned 100, and thus Fun Facts of the Day was born. For several months thereafter I was responsible for providing fun yet dry facts to my coworkers, but in reality all I did was send a list of 15 twice a month. Upon getting bought out at the end of June, I promised one final edition up until the June 28th acquisition, but never came through. Please read below for the 9 I came up with that would cover something like through June 12th or so. On other days when I am in a rush and don't have anything original to say I will provide the rest, but behold...the unpublished basement tapes of FFOD:

The Smithfield Packing Company is a one-million square foot pork processing facility in South Carolina that is the largest in the world

Americans consist of 6% of the world’s population but consume 35% of all resources

Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead bassist) was saved by an organ donor and makes a note of it at every concert he performs in, encouraging others to sign the back of their license

India is home to 23 billionaires, and China is home to 8 billionaires

In 2005, foreign investment in India was approximately $8.4 billion, while it was $72.4 billion in China

Chief Justice John Roberts was not allowed to participate in this year’s trial that challenges the president’s power to order military trials for suspected foreign terrorists held at the Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba because he served on an appeals court panel last year in the very same case.

New York, Portland, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle are the only cities in the US that are exempt from federal water filtration requirements. However, New York is up for review at the end of 2006, and muddy runoff originating in upstate may require the city to build a filtration plant at a cost of $8 billion

In order to protect its watersheds and control development, New York City has purchased 70,000 acres at a cost of $168 million just over the last decade. As a result, the city pays a property tax of over $100 million every year.