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Harper’s Index
Estimated amount a major-party U.S. presidential candidate must raise per hour this year to become a nominee: $2,466
Ratio of campaign spending per vote won last year by Newt Gingrich to spending per vote won by Senator Russ Feingold: 9:1
Ratio of the number of House incumbents who ran unopposed last year to the total number of congressmen in 1791: 1:1
Percentage change since 1994 in the number of votes cast by members of union households: +66
Percentage change since then in the number of Republican candidates endorsed by a union: +125
Hours after ABC's technical union declared a strike last fall that Al Gore canceled an ABC interview: 12
Chances that a Disney World employee is unionized: 2 in 5
Rank of Disney World, among the country's largest single-site employers: 1
Rank of the Budweiser frog TV-ad campaign, among the most popular commercials with children over the age of six: 1
Ratio of the number of political ads aired last year that used the word “good” to those that used the word “evil”: 44:1
Ratio of minutes that the three major networks spent on the Lewinsky story last fall to minutes they spent on Kosovo: 5:1
Hours after Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic agreed to last fall's Kosovo peace plan that he closed two newspapers: 12
Percentage of the fall 1998 issue of Britain's The Ecologist magazine devoted to an investigation of Monsanto: 95
Percentage of the issue's entire press run immediately pulped by the printer, for fear of breaking British libel laws: 100
Number of Boston library workers who required counseling last summer after a flood soaked 50,000 cartons of books: 12
Ratio of total U.S. disaster aid to Honduras last year to average annual U.S. military aid to Honduras in the 1980s: 6:7
Percentage of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency's one-page biography of Chile's Augusto Pinochet that is classified: 90
Number of words devoted to the Depression in Houghton Mifflin's fifth-grade history book, Build Our Nation: 332
Number devoted to the baseball career of Cal Ripken Jr.: 339
Chance that an NBA player has a toenail fungus: 1 in 3
Price that Manhattan's new NBA boutique charges for a Waterford crystal vase engraved with an image of Larry Bird: $8,000
Value of each 20,000-yen government-issued “shopping voucher” to be received this year by 35 million Japanese: $165
Estimated number of days that Russia's emergency food reserve could feed the country: 5
Number of dates since 1914 that the Jehovah's Witnesses have predicted as the start of the apocalypse: 7
Change since 1916 in the percentage of U.S. scientists who say they believe in a god: 0
Chance that a Jewish Jerusalemite agrees that sovereignty over the city's holy sites “ultimately belongs to God”: 1 in 3
Chances that a Palestinian Jerusalemite believes this: 2 in 3
Average number of donations that a North Carolina church receives each week through its ATM: 7
Percentage of the funds spent fighting Alaska's gay-marriage initiative last year that came from the Mormon Church: 79
Ratio of the number of state ballot initiatives to limit abortion voted on last year to those advocating animal rights: 1:3
Extra days of legal duck hunting this month in three Southern states as a result of Senator Trent Lott's lobbying: 14
Chance that an American believes Bill Clinton is “a bigger threat to the American way of life” than Saddam Hussein: 1 in 5
Estimated amount the Pentagon will spend this year on Viagra: $50,000,000
Number of the three action figures inspired by John Glenn that are dressed in a suit and tie: 1
Estimated number of colleges that Newt Gingrich's high-school football coach queried in vain for a big enough helmet: 5
Estimated number of people who watched a live Webcast of a hair transplant last fall: 8,000
Months after boxing promoter Don King was acquitted of fraud last year that he took his jurors to the Bahamas: 2
Price of a day's excursion at Obertraun Schilcherhaus, an Austrian resort offering nude cross-country skiing: $30
Number of emergency-room visits in 1997 by elderly Americans injured while snowboarding: 75
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