11/90Attendance at a “reenactment” of the Panama invasion, at McChord Air Force Base in Washington last July: 125,000
1/91Endowment of the Jackie Mason Lectureship in Contemporary Judaism at Oxford University: £125,000
3/96Estimated minimum amount Forbes would save in personal income tax under the flat tax he advocates: $129,000
Average amount spent lobbying one: $130,000
12/91Amount the EPA will spend this year to research the role of livestock flatulence in global warming: $130,000
1/93Votes cast in November for Absolutely Nobody, a candidate for lieutenant-governor of Washington: 130,438
9/05Number of Danish graduate students who last December released a copyright-free recipe for an “open-source beer”: 15
12/03Spending Winston Churchill approved in 1943 to research making an aircraft carrier out of ice and wood pulp: $136,000
5/03Number of Japanese children who refused to attend school last year, according to Japan’s government: 138,722
4/08Estimated number of wild New York City pigeons illegally caught and sold to shooting clubs each year: 144,000
3/84Movie theaters in the United States: 16,901
In the Soviet Union: 144,100
11/05Salary of a new State Department job created, in Secretary Rice’s words, to “accelerate the demise” of Castro’s regime: $145,000
4/93Fee Paramount paid a Los Angeles psychologist last year to tailor a script “to the needs of a mass audience”: $150,000
8/05Number of Iraqi troops that have been “trained and equipped,” according to President Bush in April: 150,000
Number that the U.S. military considers ready to deploy independently: 1,500
10/06Amount the Alaska Zoo paid last year to build a treadmill for its 8,000-pound elephant: $150,000
5/92Miles of fiber-optic cable laid last year, worldwide: 150,416
2/08Government salary at which Bernard Kerik in 1999 said that he felt like he was on “welfare”: $150,500
4/99Number of times a Florida Fox-TV station asked 2 reporters to rewrite a news story on Monsanto in 1997: 83
Amount the station offered the reporters to quit their jobs and keep silent after the news story was killed: $151,250
2/08Number of votes tallied in an online Greenpeace poll last fall to name a humpback whale in the South Pacific: 152,000
Percentage that favored the name “Mr. Splashy Pants”: 79
9/90Number of snails that animal-rights activists liberated from a snail farm in England last March: 153,000
2/01Pages of Haitian government documents that the United States has held since seizing them from the country in 1994: 160,000
9/03Price a San Diego physicist paid at auction in June for mechanisms used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: $167,000
11/02Estimated number of U.S. high school graduates who will forgo college this year solely for financial reasons: 168,000
9/89Average change, in 1988, in the top executive’s salary at companies that laid off at least 1,000 workers: +$174,000
6/86Number of people who try unsuccessfully to get President Reagan on the telephone each year: 175,000
12/90Number of new businesses that have been started in Poland this year: 175,000
Number of businesses that have folded: 147,000
2/94Amount a Chicago woman won last year after suing her former fiancé for breaking their 7-week engagement: $178,000
11/98Amount that CBS is paying Rome’s Atlante Star hotel to use its rooftop view of St. Peter’s when the Pope dies: $180,000
6/92Amount H. Ross Perot and his family members have contributed to candidates for federal office since 1979: $180,650
3/88Number of privately owned machine guns in the United States: 183,895
4/86Amount the IRS claims John Walker Jr. owes in back taxes on income he earned from spying: $193,873
8/07Amount the political action committee of 2008 hopeful Fred Thompson has given to Republican causes since 2003: $83,650
Amount the PAC has paid since then in consulting fees to Thompson’s son: $196,260
11/05Number of erotic Harry Potter fan-fiction stories posted on a website run by an Illinois woman: 1,750
Average number of hits the site receives each day: 198,000
Portion of those addicts who are under 21: 2/3
4/93Amount NASA spent to develop the sanitary-napkin disposal unit in the space shuttle Endeavour: $200,000
8/96Copies of Muammar Qaddafi’s first short-story collection sold in Egypt since its publication last March: 200,000
8/00Gallons of bourbon that flowed into the Kentucky River last May during a fire at a Wild Turkey warehouse: 200,000
8/00Bounty placed on the head of any U.S. DEA agent last January by Mexico’s Juárez drug cartel: $200,000
10/00Amount a Chicago suburb’s city council offered a Muslim group last June to abandon its plans for a mosque there: $200,000
3/01Annual number of U.S. elementary school students who play The Stock Market Game, a 10-week trading simulation: 200,000
Additional amount they may borrow on margin: $100,000
2/05Price a D.C. hotel charges for its ”Presidential Privilege 2005” inauguration package, which includes a mink coat: $200,500
9/03Amount New Zealand’s Fire Service spent this year on a TV campaign against cooking while drunk: $201,300
10/05Average estimated salary, in today’s dollars, of the dads on the ten top-rated TV shows of the 1950s: $77,000
Average for the dads on today’s ten top-rated shows: $207,000
11/85Price of a fully equipped “terrorist-proof” Mercedes 500 at Washington’s Counter Spy Shop: $208,000
6/01Average number of food-poisoning incidents in the United States each day: 208,000
1/00Estimated bushels of maize paid annually to the Aztec rulers of the city of Tenochtitlán by their subjects: 210,000
8/01Percentage change since 1998 in the amount Americans spend each year on prescription drugs: +40
Estimated number of Americans who died last year from adverse reactions to such drugs: 218,000
2/05Cost of “The Sword,” an unmanned robo-soldier equipped with a rifle, machine gun, or rocket launcher: $230,000
2/05Average total cost for a U.S. eighty-year-old to live out the rest of his or her days on a luxury cruise ship: $230,497
Average cost to live them out in an assisted-living facility: $228,075
7/05Tons of CO2 emissions that would be replaced each year by a proposed windmill project on Long Island: 235,000
Tons produced each year by a single jumbo jet making a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight daily: 210,000
7/02Amount Congress allocated Blue Springs, Missouri, this spring to help the town combat “gothic culture”: $237,437
Miles from Blue Springs to the nearest Gothic cathedral: 4,280
10/97Estimated number of people who could be fed for one year with the food Americans waste in one day: 240,183
2/94Amount a California man won last year after suing his wife for feigning sexual attraction to him for 13 years: $242,000
1/06Number of small businesses that applied for U.S. disaster loans after last fall’s hurricanes: 244,602
11/84Number of American children conceived with donated sperm and/or carried to term by surrogate mothers: 250,000
12/84Estimated number of defense-industry jobs that would be lost in the event of a nuclear freeze: 250,000
3/91Number of Jews who arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union last year: 145,000
Number of Palestinians who arrived in Jordan from Kuwait last year: 250,000
10/92Asking price for a former U.S. Air Force nuclear-bomb shelter in Amherst, Massachusetts: $250,000
Number performed on born-again or evangelical Christians: 250,000
9/97Annual amount the U.S. government spends to maintain a one-acre medicinal-marijuana farm in Mississippi: $250,000
9/97Estimated gun sales prevented by background checks before the Supreme Court made them nonmandatory last July: 250,000
1/98Minimum campaign contribution that newly released tapes reveal Nixon citing as the price of an ambassadorship: $250,000
11/98Ratio of the number of “cigar” references in Kenneth Starr’s report to the number of “Whitewater” references: 9:1
Fine that the report’s Internet posting might have brought if 1996’s Communications Decency Act had become law: $250,000
7/99Minimum amount that six defense contractors each paid last April to “sponsor” NATO’s 50th anniversary summit: $250,000
9/00Amount contributed for a University of Nebraska English chair last June by the founder of CliffsNotes: $250,000
8/06Average amount Israel has paid to relocate each settler from the Gaza Strip: $250,000
Average annual cost of a private intelligence contractor: $250,000
3/05Amount to which a San Diego defense analyst’s payments to Social Security had appreciated when he retired in 1994: $261,372
Amount to which he calculated they would have grown if he had invested in a Dow Jones index fund instead: $248,166
4/06Number of U.S. veterans who have been denied Veterans Administration health care since 2003: 263,257
11/98Tons of U.S. chicken feet exported last year to China: 264,000
10/92Average retirement and disability benefits Bob and Elizabeth Dole will receive annually if both retire next year: $266,000
5/95Average amount the federal government spends each day on paid informants: $266,000
9/94Slot-machine revenue earned last year by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe’s casino in Connecticut, per Pequot: $267,300.97
11/94Number of turkeys the United Parcel Service gives its employees each Thanksgiving: 267,600
8/04State grant awarded a Missouri police department’s Youth Outreach Unit two years ago to battle Goth culture: $273,000
Amount the Unit returned to the state in April after no Goth-influenced youth could be found to aid: $132,000
Amount spent in the interim to set up the program: $141,000
8/02Price a Las Vegas filmmaker charges through his website for a film of homeless men fighting each other: $19.95
4/94Amount the federal government spent on pickle research last year: $277,000
3/03Year in which the last two federal studies of the possible side effects of mass smallpox vaccination were published: 1968
Number of Americans one study expects to suffer “serious reactions” in the event of such vaccinations: 286,404
Factor by which this study’s estimate exceeds that of the other: 16
1/87Number of federal employees who have agreed to submit all future writing to the government for clearance: 290,000
8/06Amount of casino profits that the Pechanga, a California tribe, paid out last year to each of its adults: $290,000
Portion of the tribe that is being expelled or has been expelled since 2004 over allegations of insufficient heritage: 1/4
9/93Number of Americans who have joined Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition since November: 300,000
1/94Amount Miller Brewing spends each year to promote its Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund: $300,000
Amount it spends each year to endow the scholarship: $150,000
7/99Amount that the head of Chinese military intelligence gave Clinton fund-raiser Johnny Chung in 1996: $300,000
Ratio of the amount that Chung spent on himself to the amount that he gave to the Democratic National Committee: 14:1
8/02Number of names of U.S. peace and civil-rights activists in the CIA’s Operation CHAOS database in 1973: 300,000
10/02Grant given a Maryland professor last October to create an online archive of dot-com-era business plans: $300,500
5/05Minimum number of miles that a private jet has been flown to take U.S. terror suspects to “rendition” abroad: 302,000
Round-trips from D.C. to Tehran that this many frequent-flyer miles on American Airlines will buy: 4
10/08Number of graves Iran’s army claims it is digging at the nation’s borders, for the burial of invading soldiers: 320,000
10/07Head of cattle that Fidelity Investments keeps on a portion of its corporate campus near Fort Worth: 25
1/00Number of pages accumulated in the FBI’s Sex Deviates file by the time the program was abandoned in 1977: 330,000
12/92Average fine levied last year on U.S. companies convicted of illegal pollution in white communities: $333,566
Average fine levied on companies convicted of illegal pollution in minority communities: $55,318
2/05Number of copies of Helping Your Child Learn History destroyed by the Department of Education last summer: 338,500
12/02Amount Colombia paid civilians for informing on rebels in its first five weeks of recruiting this year: $340,000
11/08Number of South Koreans pardoned by the country’s president on August 15: 341,864
4/01Declared value of the jewelry stolen from rapper Prodigy last December after he left a music-video shoot in Queens: $343,000
2/08Amount that D.C. city officials were found last fall to have embezzled through a dummy firm called Bilkemor LLC: $346,700
4/95Number of years O.J. Simpson’s trial would have to last before his legal fees exceeded this year’s federal budget: 348,985
10/06Number of Americans whose past-due accounts the IRS will turn over to private debt collectors by 2008: 350,000
10/07Number of Wal-Mart employees on whom the company secretly took out life-insurance policies from 1993 to 1995: 350,000
12/04Number with a Reform, Green, and/or Socialist Workers Party candidate on the ballot, respectively: 35,28,14
6/89Estimated number of New York City residents temporarily living with others because they have no apartment: 360,000
4/06Cost of a U.S. pilot project in a New Jersey school to use an eye scanner to identify all adults who enter: $369,000
12/93Amount the U.S. Department of Transportation will spend next year on a study of drunk walking: $370,000
3/06Number of copies sold in Japan since last summer of a comic book about the worthlessness of China: 180,000
9/89Change, since 1987, in the total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States: +379,000
Change, since 1987, in the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States held by union members: -175,000
9/95Number of Holocaust victims baptized posthumously into the Mormon church without their families’ permission: 380,000
8/87Campaign contributions made by lawyers in the Pennzoil-Texaco lawsuit to Texas judges: $387,900
5/94Average cost of a House campaign in 1992: $389,588
6/98Number of institutions that are on a “higher moral ground” than the World Bank, according to its president: 0
Amount the Bank spent last year to gild the ceilings of its Washington headquarters: $400,000
3/04Number of the 4 million Bosnians made refugees since 1991 who are still waiting to go home: 400,000
1/07Amount a Rhode Island man received in a settlement last year over his faulty penile implant: $400,000
Number of years he has had an erection: 10
11/97Amount of soft money raised by political parties this year for every campaign-finance-reform bill introduced: $404,000
5/98Amount that a Disney licensing agreement has earned the Royal Canadian Mounted Police since 1995: $414,848
2/90Barrels of oil that would be saved each day if U.S. auto-efficiency standards were raised by 1 mile per gallon: 420,000
7/91Job and business inquiries made in March to the Commerce Department’s Persian Gulf Reconstruction Center: 434,000
1/09Number of all U.S. war veterans who have been denied Veterans Administration health care since 2003: 452,677
9/07Amount that Hillary Clinton had received by this spring from former donors to George W. Bush: $454,850
Amount that Barack Obama had received from such donors: $320,514
3/00Damages awarded Pizza Hut last winter after it sued a competitor whose ads claimed it made “better” pizza: $467,620
1/85Bottles of Scotch imported by the Ethiopian government to celebrate its tenth anniversary: 480,000
Average amount that he or she would pay to become president: $55,000
5/92Estimated number of American homeowners who had foreclosure proceedings initiated against them in 1991: 488,800
12/84Number of American men who have surgery each year solely to improve their personal appearance: 500,000
6/86Shipments of hazardous materials made in the United States each day: 500,000
Portion of all vehicles carrying hazardous materials that are incorrectly labeled: 1/4
6/86Estimated number of Americans who have counterfeit diplomas or credentials: 500,000
1/87Price of renting the Queen Elizabeth II for an overnight “cruise to nowhere” for 600 guests: $500,000
8/87Condoms that New York City will distribute at singles bars, porn theaters, and massage parlors this year: 500,000
12/87Donation required for the opportunity to name a “grand staircase” at Carnegie Hall: $500,000
Donation required to name the service elevator there: $250,000
8/88Funds budgeted by the Republican National Committee for negative research on Michael Dukakis: $500,000
Funds budgeted by the Democratic National Committee for negative research on George Bush: $250,000
7/90Number of West Germans expected to file claims for property seized by East Germany since 1949: 500,000
4/91Amount the British Boy Scouts have earned since 1988 by selling corporate advertising space on merit badges: $500,000
4/99Settlement paid 3 female federal inmates last year after guards sold them as sex slaves to male prisoners: $500,000
6/01Annual amount spent since 1995 to maintain a former U.S. congressional nuclear shelter as a tourist site: $500,000
4/06Estimated number of North Korean‒produced counterfeit $100 “supernotes” discovered worldwide since 1989: 500,000
1/07Minimum number of South Africans who do their banking entirely by mobile phone: 500,000
Percentage of these that have been registered in any trackable fashion: 2
10/06Average salary package last year among all full-time employees of Goldman Sachs, including support staff: $521,000
2/01Number of Floridian ex-cons denied the right to vote last November because of felony convictions: 525,000
Number who moved to the South: 528,000
4/87Funds the Justice Department antitrust unit seeks for “higher than anticipated” 1988 phone rates: $528,000
8/91Number of cigarette butts collected on U.S. beaches during the 1990 National Beach Cleanup: 531,828
3/08Average compensation of the ten highest-salaried presidents of U.S. public universities: $533,000
8/85Amount the government will pay Ed Meese to cover legal expenses incurred in his Ethics Act inquiry: $472,190
7/97Amount raised for Cuban health care in Havana last February at a government auction of Cohiba premium cigars: $540,000
8/91Amount of the toxic-waste fine that the EPA levied against Disneyland in 1990: $550,000
5/99Amount Cambodia has agreed to pay a U.S. lobbying firm to “recast” Hun Sen’s government “in a favorable light”: $550,000
11/00Amount Anheuser-Busch contributed as a sponsor of the St. Louis presidential debate this year: $550,000
9/03Rank of measles among diseases that kill the most children worldwide each year and can be prevented by vaccine: 1
Cost of vaccinating the 745,000 children who died from the disease in 2001: $558,750
1/88Number of cheerleaders in the United States: 600,000
5/89Amount given to Florida State University to endow the Burt Reynolds Eminent Scholar Chair in Theater: $600,000
Number of months Charles Nelson Reilly has held the chair: 16
5/94Limit on congressional campaign spending proposed in the House campaign reform bill: $600,000
10/00Estimated tons of lead contained in the estimated 315 million computers that will be obsolete by 2004: 600,000
1/87Jobs California has gained since 1981 as a result of increases in defense spending: 607,250
1/06Number of weather futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the first nine months of last year: 612,000
Number in all of 2004: 120,000
5/00Estimated number of American men who suffer from compulsive bodybuilding: 669,000
7/96Farm subsidies received since 1985 by the Montana Freeman whose ranch became the group’s stronghold last March: $676,082
3/06Amount paid last fall for a Ford Escort driven by Pope John Paul II: $680,000
6/94Amount Random House lost on the 29 of its books included on the 1993 New York Times Notable Books list: $698,000
6/92Packs of Death brand cigarettes sold in the United States since they were introduced last spring: 700,000
10/98Estimated number of U.S. high school students enrolled in first-year Latin classes last year: 88,600
3/08Number of South Koreans who work as on-call “replacement drivers” for customers too drunk to drive home: 83,000
Estimated number of customers they serve each day: 700,000
12/03Number of new government jobs created since 2000: 721,000
12/90Price, in zlotys, of a “saddle of love” from Intersex, a newly opened sexual-novelty shop in Warsaw: 724,000
8/07Number of the five directors of a No Child Left Behind reading program who had financial ties to curricula they developed: 4