12/01Date on which the first contract for a book about September 11 was signed: 9/13
12/01Date on which the results of a 13-member major-media consortium’s 2000 election recount were to be made public: 9/24
Days before this that the New York Times, a consortium member, declared the unreleased results “utterly irrelevant”: 1
Number of consortium members that ran a news story on their decision to delay publicizing the results indefinitely: 0
12/01Number of minutes of network news coverage devoted to Colombia in the month following September 11: 0
12/01Page on which the New York Times reported the EPA’s 7-year extension of genetically modified corn sales last fall: C6
12/01Chance that a “GMO-free”food product studied last April contained no genetically modified ingredients: 1 in 5
12/01Price per family that a Puerto Rican company charged last December for a 5-minute stay in a refrigerated snowscape: $30
12/01Number of mimes Guatemala’s transit department hired last April to administer driver “education” at busy intersections: 20
12/01Price of a 12-hour do-it-yourself anger-management course from an online vendor: $165
12/01Total number of bids placed on Bidforsurgery.com since last year: 12,600
12/01Minimum number of anthrax hoaxes reported in the United States in the three years before September 11: 175
12/01Number of members of the rock band Anthrax who say they are hoarding Cipro so as to avoid an “ironic death”: 1
12/01Years after Ernest Hemingway killed himself that his transsexual son died last fall in a Miami women’s jail: 40
12/01Percentage change since 1994 in the number of boys on competitive U.S. high school cheerleading squads: +470
12/01Percentage change between 1998 and 1999 in the number of women construction workers: +36
12/01Ratio of New York City welfare recipients whose benefits ended this year to the number of police officers there: 1:1
12/01Total new tax cuts for U.S. businesses approved by the House of Representatives in October: $146,000,000,000
12/01Ratio of the projected cost of General Electric’s dredging of its PCBs from the Hudson River to its total profits last year: 1:280
Earliest year in which the dredging might begin: 2004
12/01Estimated percentage of U.S. electricity demand that could be met by covering the nation’s roofs with solar panels: 27
12/01Maximum number of gallons of oil stored under the World Trade Center on a given day: 86,000
12/01Estimated number of mock commando raids on U.S. nuclear-weapons facilities that have been staged since 1995: 100
Minimum number that succeeded in breaching security: 50
Estimated number of minutes after the cat was released on its first test run that it was killed by a taxi: 10
12/01Estimated amount Cleveland has spent in the last two years fulfilling Y2K-protection contracts: $11,000,000
12/01Months after the millennium that Dublin plans to complete the erection of its 394-foot Millennium Spike: 20
12/01Internal code number the British census has assigned to citizens who cited their religion as “Jedi Knight”: 896
12/01Ratio of businesses to military sites attacked by international terrorists between 1995 and 2000: 38:1