8/88Percentage of adults who say that, even if they could, they would not change anything about their appearance: 4
4/97Number of years Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary used an electric space heater in her DOE office: 4
Number of years, according to O’Leary, beyond which only someone “probably certifiable” would head the DOE: 4
1/02Months after Element 118 was added to a textbook’s periodic table last year that its discovery was invalidated: 4
2/86Percentage of U.S. households composed of a father who works, a mother who doesn’t, and two children: 4
4/86Number of pencils David Letterman tosses over his shoulder during an average show: 4
9/86Number of the seven domestic terrorist attacks in 1985 that the FBI believes were committed by Jewish groups: 4
9/86Annual percentage growth, since 1981, in the income of people who live in California and the East Coast states: 4
In the income of people who live in the other thirty-four states: 1.4
5/87Number of the ten largest banks in California that are owned by Japanese: 4
7/87Number of U.S. towns and cities named Constitution: 4
8/87Average annual percentage increase, since 1981, in the productivity of U.S. manufacturing workers: 4
Average annual percentage increase, since 1981, in the hourly wage of U.S. manufacturing workers: 0.8
8/87Times New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal’s office door was painted before he was happy with the color: 4
5/88Officers needed to evict the last resident of the Memphis motel where a Martin Luther King museum will open: 4
4/89Price of a 10-ounce bottle of Mendocino Truffle Mineral Water: $4
5/89Number of honorary degrees held by Frank Sinatra: 3
10/89Ratio of Soviet arms sales to Third World countries to U.S. arms sales to Third World countries in 1986: 4:1
Ratio today: 1:1
11/89Number of camels Muammar Qaddafi brought to the conference of nonaligned countries in August: 4
12/89Number of times President Bush has increased the amount of his pledge of aid to Poland since July: 4
1/90Number of Supreme Court justices in 1984 who voted against legalizing the recording of TV broadcasts by VCR: 4
2/90Percentage of American parents who say their grown children’s old bedrooms have been “preserved as a shrine”: 4
3/90Factor by which the blood lead level OSHA permits in workers exceeds maximum safety levels proposed by the EPA: 4
3/90Percentage of Israel’s 1989 defense budget that was spent to combat the intifada: 4
10/90Number of the 6 best-selling extracurricular books in college bookstores that are collections of cartoons: 4
12/90Number of television pilots broadcast in September that contained the word “suck”: 4
2/91Ratio of the number of corporate bonds that Moody’s downgraded in 1990 to the number it upgraded: 4:1
7/91Number of the original 13 American states that cannot locate their handwritten original copy of the Bill of Rights: 4
8/91Estimated radiation dose absorbed by President Bush during his thyroid treatment, in rads: 4
1/92Number of the six Democratic candidates who say they will not accept PAC funds for their campaigns: 4
2/92Hours a former Communist Party official stood in line for sugar last fall before committing suicide the next day: 4
4/92Number of years Gloria Steinem says she lived in her apartment before realizing that the oven did not work: 4
5/92Average number of times Dr. Benjamin Spock, 89, consults his psychoanalyst each week: 4
10/92Number of the seven most widely consumed food crops in the world that are native to the Americas: 4
12/92Ratio of the amount of air pollution a U.S. factory is allowed to produce to the amount a German factory is allowed: 4:1
12/92Ratio of manufacturers’ coupons printed last year to the number of bills printed by the U.S. Treasury: 4:1
7/93Number of women scalped by hay balers in New York State since 1976: 4
11/93Number of wooden boards split by Congressman Tom Foley at a martial-arts championship held in Washington in July: 4
12/93Age at which a child’s belief in Santa Claus peaks: 4
1/94Percentage of all immigrants to the United States during the 1980s who were receiving welfare in 1989: 4
3/94Number of US. politicians who have appeared on Sesame Street: 4
4/94Pairs of tickets to a Bette Midler concert given to Californians last year in exchange for their guns: 4
11/94Percentage of Americans who believe that Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley will be married “forever”: 4
1/95Ratio of the salary of the director of the National Wildlife Federation to that of the director of Greenpeace USA: 4:1
3/95Number of years McDonald’s has been suing 2 unemployed Britons for distributing pamphlets calling its food “unhealthy”: 4
5/95Percentage of Chinese who agree with Mao’s dictum “Never think of yourself, give everything in service to society”: 4
9/95Weeks after the peso collapsed that former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari joined the board of Dow Jones: 4
9/95Marriage proposals received by Timothy McVeigh since his arrest last April for the Oklahoma bombing: 4
10/95Number of states in which a black college graduate’s average income is at least 90 percent of a white college graduate’s: 4
12/95Ratio of Republicans to Democrats elected president since 1900 who lost their bid for re-election: 4:1
1/96Ratio of the amount Britons spent on lottery tickets last year to the amount they spent on tea: 4:1
1/96Number of L.A.’s Mo’ Better Meaty Meat Burger restaurant specials that are named for O.J. Simpson trial participants: 4
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
8/96Length, in feet, of the course used this month at New Jersey’s Annual Cockroach Derby: 4
9/96Years of consideration preceding the inclusion of the word “phat” in Random House’s 1996 Compact Unabridged Dictionary: 4
10/96Number of Hollywood movies released since last October in which a fictional U.S. president is one of the characters: 4
Number of these in which the first lady is already dead or is killed in the movie: 3
11/96Number of times Bill Clinton met with Secretary of Education Richard Riley last August: 1
Number of Hollywood’s 100 top-grossing actors who are: 0
1/97Number of hospital fires in 1995 caused by the spontaneous combustion of latex patient-examination gloves: 4
3/97Number of ex-inmates of South Africa’s Robben Island Prison who now serve as tour guides there: 4
Number of ex-guards who do: 2
4/97Average number of days after U.S. clocks are set forward each spring that the fatal-accident rate declines to normal: 4
6/97Number of months ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began a “self-study” course in Arabic: 4
7/97Number of months before hiring Bob Dole last May that a D.C. law firm represented its first tobacco company: 4
Number of weeks after being hired that Dole announced he would loan Newt Gingrich $300,000 to pay his ethics fine: 2
8/97Ratio of times a member of Congress was accused of being a “liar” in the 104th session to the times a foreigner was: 4:1
Average ratio in the three previous terms: 1:2
4/98Estimated ratio of veterans reporting Gulf War syndrome symptoms to total U.S. Vietnam War combat deaths: 4:1
6/98Number of Congress members who attended a Capitol Hill hearing last March on the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia: 4
6/98Years after the Rwandan massacre that President Clinton admitted “we did not act quickly enough”: 4
6/98Number of artificial reefs planned for construction worldwide to facilitate surfing: 4
7/98Number of city and state agencies suing New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani over his withholding of public records: 4
7/98Months before the 1929 stock market crash that Forbes magazine noted the “heroic scale” of U.S. economic growth: 4
9/98Number of times last June that air-traffic controllers lost track of the altitude or speed of Air Force I or II: 4
11/98Months after publicly calling the President a “scumbag” last April that Rep. Dan Burton admitted his own adultery: 4
12/98Number of liposuction machines that Iraq sought U.N. permission to import last June: 4
6/99Strokes by which O.J. Simpson reports that his golf handicap has improved since the murder of his wife: 4
10/99Factor by which the 123,500 acres of coca that Colombia reports eradicating last year exceeds CIA estimates: 4
10/99Billions of gallons of water that the GOP reported released into a New Hampshire river in July for an Al Gore visit: 4
Billions of gallons actually released, and average amount released into the river each day, respectively: 1.67, 1.9
11/99Ratio of lines devoted to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 1999 Who’s Who in America to those devoted to her husband: 4:1
12/99Number of objects in the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection that are made with human dung: 4
1/00Hours required to assemble a prefabricated nuclear-bomb shelter, according to a 1961 Life magazine cover story: 4
3/00 Number of rented 40-foot refrigerator trailers the LAPD uses to house biological evidence: 4
5/00Points by which the percentage of U.S. college students who are “frequent binge drinkers ” has changed since 1993: +3
Points by which the percentage who are abstainers has changed: +4
6/00Weeks before Peru ‘s national election last April that President Alberto Fujimori raised the minimum wage by 18 percent: 4
9/00Days after the Koreas’ rapprochement last June that the U.S. replaced the term “rogue states” with “states of concern”: 4
11/00Number of the six formerly inert elements whose inertia Finnish scientists have managed to disrupt: 4
12/00Factor by which Texas’s incarceration rate has increased since 1990 for every 1 percent drop in its crime rate: 4
Factor by which New York’s incarceration rate has increased since then for every 1 percent drop in its crime rate: 0.7
12/00Ratio of the average duration of an 1858 Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debate to that of a presidential debate this year: 4:1
12/00Ratio of the number of glaciers in Montana ‘s Glacier National Park in 1850 to the number last year: 4:1
1/01Number of the 614 arrests of protesters at last year’s presidential conventions that have led to criminal convictions: 4
3/01Days after Time named George W. Bush 2000’s man of the year that Russians named Vladimir Lenin man of the century: 4
5/01Distance from Auschwitz, in miles, of a camp tannery in which an investor group proposed opening a disco in 1999: 2
Months after the plan was shelved due to protest that another was approved, allowing a disco to open there last August: 4
8/01Duration in decades of an Alabama study that allowed hundreds of syphilitic African Americans to go untreated: 4
Number of decades between the end of the study and the Alabama legislature’s expression of “regret” over it in May: 3
3/02Number of Swedish teenagers convicted of lese majesty in December for hitting the king with a cream cake: 4
Total number of Swedish officials hit by cream cakes last year: 3
5/02Number of attendees at a New York City “drought awareness” workshop for landlords this spring: 4
5/02Number of current Bush Administration officials who were involved in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal: 4
6/02Factor by which the Bush Administration’s budget proposal in February increased federal funding to fight bioterrorism: 4
9/02Decades by which the United States applied last spring to extend its nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands: 4
10/02Minimum number of U.S. universities where Halloween celebrations last year included at least one student in blackface: 4
5/03Factor by which Americans’ total debt to private lenders for college tuition has increased since 1995: 4
5/03Minimum number of hydrogen-car fueling stations currently under construction in Tokyo: 4
10/04Number of the 5 Republicans investigating Rep. Tom DeLay on ethics charges who have taken donations from his PAC: 4
12/04Chances that an adult male citizen of Pitcairn Island has been arrested for a sex-related crime this year: 2 in 5
Minimum number of those arrested who are direct descendants of mutineer Fletcher Christian: 4
2/05Estimated percentage by which the number of automobiles made in Ontario last year exceeded the number made in Detroit: 4
7/05Number of the fifteen previous Pope Benedicts who were eventually deposed: 4
8/05Number of killed or captured suspects reported so far by U.S. media to be Al Qaeda ’s “number 3” man: 4
10/05Days after the London attacks that Bush said the U.S. was at war abroad “so we do not have to face them here at home”: 4
10/05Number of different stories offered for sale at any one time on a Dutch dial-a-fairytale service: 4
Price to listen to a seven-minute story: $1.70
11/05Days after Hurricane Katrina that the White House authorized sending federal troops to New Orleans: 4
12/05Minimum number of U.S. generals in Iraq using private security companies for their personal security: 4
3/06Number of U.S. states whose constitutions require that public officials believe in a supreme being: 4
7/06Minimum number of close-up photographs of President Bush’s hands owned by his new chief of staff, Josh Bolten: 4
10/06Days beforehand that Deep Purple had to cancel the July 27 Lebanon date on its “Rapture of the Deep” tour: 4
6/07Days after the DVD release of Borat that it became the top item shipped to Kazakhstan by Amazon.co.uk: 4
11/07Maximum number of “unsaved” players permitted per team in a Massachusetts evangelical softball league: 4
4/08Number of the five top-grossing U.S. films last year that were the third or higher installment in a series: 4
4/08Average percentage by which the income of an attractive American man differs from the mean: +4
Average by which the income of an ugly American man does: –13
5/08Estimated percentage of the world’s oceanic waters that have not been damaged by human activity: 4
6/08Number of the last four general elections in which the nominee who served in an overseas war lost to the one who didn’t: 4
1/09Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines: 1
Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans: 4
1/09Number of 980-foot-plus “Super Tall” towers built in the Arab world in the seven years since 9/11: 4
12/95Average percentage change in the GDP in a year preceding a presidential incumbent’s re-election, since 1950: +4.1
Average percentage change in the GDP in a year preceding a presidential incumbent’s losing re-election: +0.95
5/97Average number of hours per week of public service performed last year by each Ohio prisoner who volunteered for it: 4.3
3/08Weekly fee an Italian company charges to send three images of saints to a customer’s cell phone: $4.38
9/02Richter-scale magnitude of an earthquake last June twelve miles from the Yucca site: 4.4
7/88Price of an order of sushi at Dodger Stadium: $4.50
1/93Percentage of all domestic mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service that consists of personal letters: 4.5
5/99Percentage by which Jasper County, Texas, raised property taxes this year to finance the murder trial of John William King: 4.5
5/93Total amount spent on candy last Mother’s Day, per American mother: $4.70
10/00Average number of miles by which the Concorde flies closer to the sun than other passenger planes: 4.7
2/93Price of a lunch of lobster, asparagus, and poached pears, at the Treasury Department executive dining room: $4.75
6/00Price of a gallon of gas in the United Kingdom last April: $4.84
Price a year earlier: $3.87
11/87Amount the Republican Party raised in 1985 and 1986 for every $1 raised by the Democratic Party: $4.86
1/01Amount Florida state employees donated to the Bush campaign last year for every dollar they donated to Gore: $4.92
5/92Price of Killer Kommando, Blade Invader, Twin Geeks, and Bad Fart, a set of toy action figures from Kenner: $4.95
7/92Price of a one-pound tub of Zoo Doo, a fertilizer produced in cooperation with the Memphis Zoo: $4.95
4/84Years a Zimbabwean can be imprisoned for ridiculing President Canaan Banana: 5
12/84Estimated percentage of all U.S. defense contracts that are awarded through fully competitive bidding: 5
3/85Number of trench coats owned by Morley Safer: 5
Number in which U.S., British, or Canadian corporations own a controlling interest: 4
8/85Number of the ten most popular TV shows among families earning more than $30,000 that are on NBC: 5
10/86Percentage of Icelanders who say they believe in elves: 5
1/87Number of times Bill Cosby’s name is listed in the credits for The Cosby Show: 5
10/87States that have not outlawed cockfighting: 5
6/88Percentage of students at Dunkin’ Donuts University who do not pass the six-week training course: 5
9/88Number of the nine athletes that have appeared most frequently on the cover of Sports Illustrated who are white: 5
10/88Number of Japanese children who have died since 1985 as a result of disciplinary beatings by school personnel: 5
3/90Number of the chemicals used to make plastic that rank among the 6 leading producers of hazardous waste: 5
4/90Ratio of presidential press conferences held last year to presidential press conferences held in 1981: 5:1
Ratio of network TV news coverage of George Bush last year to coverage of Ronald Reagan in 1981: 1:3
6/90Members of the Panamanian cabinet who have owned or directed banks accused of laundering drug money: 5
7/90Average number of Latin American countries the United States has invaded and occupied each decade since 1900: 5
9/90Change, since 1972, in the percentage of employed American men who have an employer-financed pension plan: -5
Change in the percentage of employed American women who do: +5
10/90Number of minutes of Die Hard 2 watched this year by a congressional subcommittee researching computer terrorism: 5
11/90Percentage of Americans who say that the leftovers in their refrigerators are more than four weeks old: 5