2/96Average change in a Democratic president’s approval rating after sending troops into a new conflict, in points: +2
Average change in a Republican president’s approval rating: +8
2/96Number of times reporters broke into laughter during a White House press briefing on Bosnia held last November: 5
2/96Ratio of visits to Bosnia made by President Clinton since 1992 to those made by the editor of Soldier of Fortune: 1:4
2/96Number of years Serbian leader Radovan Karadžić spent practicing psychiatry: 20
2/96Chances that the phrase “you will” appears on a page of Bill Gates’s new book, The Road Ahead: 1 in 5
2/96Ratio of Steven P. Jobs earnings last year on the day his firm’s stock went public to Michael Milken’s 1987 earnings: 1:1
Ratio of Jobs’s average hourly earnings on that day to the U.S. minimum wage: 13,421,052:1
2/96Number of times Ringo Starr’s Private Issue credit-card ad ran during last year’s six-hour Beatles documentary: 6
2/96Chances that an ad in the January issue of Esquire offers products or services relating to hair loss: 1 in 4
Number today: 26
2/96Percentage change since 1985 in the number of personal bankruptcy applications filed in U.S. courts: +142
2/96Percentage change, since then, in the number of Americans undergoing credit counseling: +397
2/96Chances that the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a record high on any given trading day last year: 1 in 4
2/96Rank of Bob Dole and Steve Forbes among presidential candidates investors say make them feel “most bullish”: 1,2
2/96Place for which Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky are tied, among the ten political leaders Russians most trust: 8
2/96Rank of getting “rid of” Fidel Castro among Phil Gramm’s foreign-policy priorities, if elected president: 1
2/96Amount U.S. intelligence agencies have spent on psychics since 1972: $20,000,000
2/96Number of bloodhounds used by House Democrats last fall to “trail Republicans” holding a closed budget meeting: 3
2/96Price of the Truth Phone, a lie detector for the telephone, from the Counter Spy Shop in Washington, D.C.: $5,000
2/96Price a New York City company charges for removal, cleaning, storage, and reinstallation of an air conditioner: $239
2/96Chances that a New York City public school is heated with coal: 1 in 4
2/96Number of plastic liners used by Florida prisons last year to combat chafing caused by leg irons: 280
2/96Rank of iron supplements among the most common cause of fatal poisoning for U.S. children under the age of six: 1
2/96Rank of Oprah Winfrey among the celebrities Americans believe to be most qualified for the U.S. presidency: 1
2/96Percentage of Americans who say that Ronald Reagan was the president who “best personified cool ranch tortilla chips”: 25
Percentage who say that Abraham Lincoln was the president who “best personified pretzel logs”: 37
2/96Blocks from Lincoln’s tomb that a notice was posted last year warning cabdrivers not to pick up black males: 14
Estimated number of days later that the Lincoln Yellow Cab Company agreed to “monitor” its bulletin board: 48
2/96Sets played by Roger Clinton’s band last year at the opening of the Nixon Library’s “Rockin’ the White House” exhibit: 1
2/96Estimated attendance at Jesse James’s third burial, held in Kearney, Missouri, last October: 550
2/96Years in jail a California man was sentenced to last year after his third burglary offense, the theft of four cookies: 26
2/96Days in jail served by a California man convicted last year of killing one graffiti vandal and wounding another: 4
2/96Days after a baby was taken from a murdered woman’s womb last fall that Newt Gingrich blamed “the welfare state”: 4
2/96Income at which North Carolina Representative Fred Heineman believes the lower middle class begins: $100,000
Chances that an American worker’s annual income falls short of this: 39 in 40