11/85Percentage of trees in New Hampshire whose leaves turned red this fall: 13
Percentage whose leaves turned red 35 years ago: 9
10/87Price per person of a ten-day “Baseball for Peace” tour to Nicaragua during its fall baseball season: $1,150
11/89Age after which Mick Jagger has said that he’d “rather die” than still be performing “Satisfaction”: 45
Estimated amount Mick Jagger, 46, earned each time he performed “Satisfaction” on tour this fall: $10,000
12/89Number of pets blessed at the Feast of St. Francis at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine this fall: 1,000
2/90Ratio of U.S. emergency aid received by the Colombian military to aid received by the Colombian police last fall: 6:1
Ratio of the cocaine seized by the Colombian military to cocaine seized by the Colombian police in 1988: 1:4
2/90Percentage of Catholic members of the House who voted last fall to federally fund abortions for rape victims: 37
4/90Portion of thirtysomething’s advertising that was pulled from an episode last fall that showed two homosexuals in bed: 3/5
9/90Gallons of poison the New York State Conservation Department will use this fall to kill fish that displace trout: 271
1/91Number of White House changes incorporated into the civil rights bill before the President vetoed it last fall: 30
2/91Number of months Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, spent as a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics last fall: 3
2/91Estimated number of times last fall that George Bush told a joke about his dog asking for a wine list with her Alpo: 10
1/92Total presidential campaign funds raised by George Bush in his first two days of fund-raising last fall: $2,200,000
Total campaign funds raised by the six Democratic presidential candidates as of last October: $2,200,000
12/92Number of bull castrations Mississippi State’s football coach made his team watch last fall as a “motivational” experience: 1
7/92Number of soldiers the U.S. Army expected to leave the service as part of a voluntary program begun last fall: 10,000
Number of soldiers who had volunteered for the program by January, when the Army suspended it: 20,000
8/92Chances that a Republican woman running for Congress this fall is pro-choice: 1 in 3
12/93Fine levied on each of three children convicted in Texas last fall of assaulting a man dressed as Barney the dinosaur: $200
3/93Number of times a West Virginia man accidentally shot himself in the foot while cleaning his three guns last fall: 3
3/93Weight, in pounds, of a hairball removed by maintenance workers from an Alexandria, Indiana, manhole last fall: 200
1/94Rounds it took 16-year-old Dallas Malloy to win the first official women’s amateur boxing match, held last fall: 3
1/94Extra points kicked by a Virginia high school football player last fall after being elected Homecoming Queen at halftime: 3
1/94Chances that a member of the Hempstead, Texas, high school cheerleading squad was pregnant last fall: 1 in 4
12/94Number of blocks from Tiffany’s that thieves tried to sell goods stolen from the New York store this fall: 10
5/94Number of films designated as compulsory viewing for Beijing school children by the Chinese government last fall: 34
5/94Maximum fine for publishing “unverified information” in Albania, according to a new law passed last fall: $8,000
9/94Number of paramedics on duty last fall for the speed-eating contest at the Artichoke Festival in Castroville, California: 2
Number of contestants who have ever required the Heimlich maneuver: 1
1/95Number of all congressional races last fall contested by only one major-party candidate: 53
2/95Number of times the word “tsunami” appeared in the New York Times in the month following last fall’s elections: 14
2/95Number of marijuana plants for which a grower may be sentenced to death under the crime bill passed last fall: 60,000
5/95Holes in one that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il reportedly shot in a single round of golf last fall: 5
9/95Weeks after his appointment last fall that Mexico’s former secretary of education admitted he had no college degree: 6
2/96Number of bloodhounds used by House Democrats last fall to “trail Republicans” holding a closed budget meeting: 3
2/96Days after a baby was taken from a murdered woman’s womb last fall that Newt Gingrich blamed “the welfare state”: 4
3/96Percentage by which Gingrich’s publisher asked retailers last fall to discount his 1995 book, To Renew America: 38
5/96Percentage of European rabbits in southern Australia killed last fall by the inadvertent release of a virus: 95
3/97Price of a diamond-encrusted Miracle Bra introduced by Victoria’s Secret last fall: $1,000,000
1/98Number of hours a Moscow hotel flew a Microsoft flag within view of Red Square last fall when Bill Gates visited: 36
Number of lunches Gates ate in Moscow that were not from McDonald’s: 0
1/98Projected cost of a poll Newt Gingrich proposed last fall to assess Americans’ views of the I.R.S.: $35,000,000
1/98Number of nights former congressman Daniel Rostenkowski spent at a Salvation Army halfway house last fall: 60
1/98Number of Fiat owners Paris police were ordered last fall to question in connection with Princess Diana’s death: 40,000
1/98Percentage of French gas stations that ran dry after a five-day roadblock last fall by striking French truckers: 40
1/98Rolls of toilet paper received in lieu of an annual bonus last fall by each worker at a Moscow clock factory: 150
12/98Years in prison to which a former CIA agent was sentenced last fall for attempting to extort $1 million from the agency: 5
1/99Hours after ABC’s technical union declared a strike last fall that Al Gore canceled an ABC interview: 12
1/99Ratio of minutes that the three major networks spent on the Lewinsky story last fall to minutes they spent on Kosovo: 5:1
1/99Hours after Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic agreed to last fall’s Kosovo peace plan that he closed two newspapers: 12
1/99Percentage 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
2/99Number of DON’T IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT IF IT INTERRUPTS MY SOAPS! T-shirts printed by Soap Opera Digest last fall: 250
2/99Weeks after DNA testing confirmed Bill Clinton’s adultery last fall that such testing confirmed Thomas Jefferson’s as well: 7
3/99Minimum amount John Gotti Jr. told a federal judge last fall that he required each month for private guards: $21,000
5/99Head of cattle that Hyundai’s founder brought from South Korea last fall on a visit to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il: 1,000
7/99Height, in feet, of a scarlet “A” a Sunnyside, Wash., woman put in her family’s yard last fall to protest her father’s adultery: 7
9/99Change since last fall in the number of network sitcoms whose main characters are members of the same family: -25
9/99Percentage of the proceeds of an AIDS fund-raising bike ride across Texas last fall used to cover “production costs”: 85
10/00Number of Colt revolvers that a Texas judge repaired during jury selection in a capital-murder trial last fall: 2
10/00Percentage by which 11 million unexplained lobster deaths reduced Long Island Sound’s lobster harvest last fall: 90
10/00Estimated voter registration rate among Kosovo Serbs, whose leaders are calling for a boycott of this fall’s elections there: 2
12/00Average number of Palestinians killed per day by Israeli security forces in the six years preceding the 1993 Oslo accord: 0.4
Average number killed per day in the two weeks following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount last fall: 5.1
2/00Days after China announced it would begin acquiring offensive weapons that it was accepted into the WTO last fall: 7
2/00Ratio of the price of a 30-second Super Bowl ad to what Pizza Hut paid last fall for an ad on a Russian space rocket: 2:1
3/00Fine levied on a California man last fall for shooting an owl with a slingshot, then beating it: $10,000
5/00Rank of Bangladesh and Poland among countries accounting for the largest number of U.N. peacekeepers deployed last fall: 2,1
8/00Percentage of the trailers provided North Carolina’s Hurricane Floyd victims last fall that were still in use in May: 56
1/01Years that Mexico spent fighting a Texas death sentence given one of its citizens before his execution last fall: 9
1/01Years that the United States spent fighting Lori Berenson’s life sentence in Peru before she won a retrial last fall: 5
10/01Number of network-TV dramas scheduled this fall whose protagonists are employed in law enforcement or the legal system: 17
11/01Members of Congress who voted against this fall’s resolution to authorize an armed response to September 11’s attack: 1
Members who voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to authorize further U.S. attacks on Vietnam: 2
12/01Page on which the New York Times reported the EPA’s 7-year extension of genetically modified corn sales last fall: C6
12/01Years after Ernest Hemingway killed himself that his transsexual son died last fall in a Miami women’s jail: 40
2/01Number of Hooters girls who visited a teenage leukemia patient in a Philadelphia hospital last fall at his request: 3
2/01Number of Catholics who received penance at a weekend-long “confess-a-thon” held in Washington, D.C., last fall: 22,000
3/01Ratio of U.S. spending on the bombing of Serbia in 1999 to U.S. spending on Serbian election aid last fall: 80:1
4/01Number of tries it took a blind North Dakota man to pass a shooting test last fall before receiving a gun permit: 2
1/02Number of U.S. colleges and universities that were asked by law enforcement to release student information last fall: 220
1/02Amount the Pentagon paid a private company last fall for exclusive access to satellite pictures of Afghanistan: $3,800,000
1/02Number of years after being executed as witches that six Massachusetts women were exonerated last fall: 309
1/02Ratio of minutes devoted to Afghanistan in the 1990s to those devoted to it in three weeks last fall: 1:1
1/02Minimum number of Winter Olympics volunteers who were rejected last fall after a criminal background check: 273
1/02Number of knee bends that a 59-year-old Ukrainian woman performed last fall to protest U.S. attacks on Afghanistan: 1,101
12/02Organizers’ estimated attendance at this fall’s largest peace rallies in London and New York, respectively: 400,000, 25,000
Estimated attendance according to police in each city: 150,000, 12,000
Number of estimates cited in each rally’s coverage in the London Times and the New York Times, respectively: 2, 0
12/02Minutes that service on two New York subway lines was halted this fall after a Sikh worker was seen emerging from a hatch: 92
12/02Average number of people killed per week by a sniper operating in suburban Maryland and Virginia this fall: 3
Average number of homicides per week during the same period in Washington, D.C.: 7
12/02Chances that a child fed ”booger”-flavored jelly beans at a trade show this fall said they tasted like the real thing: 4 in 5
2/02Minimum amount the Saudi government spent last fall on multi-page U.S. print ads touting King Fahd: $3,200,000
2/02Estimated number of U.S. cluster bomblets dropped on Afghanistan last fall that remain unexploded: 5,000
2/02Minimum percentage of votes in each New York City election since 1988 not counted due to mechanical or human error: 3
Number of May Day demonstrators the city prosecuted last June for “masquerading in public”: 12
4/02Number of Israeli military personnel jailed since September 2000 for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories: 34
Minimum number of Israeli high school students who wrote Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last fall to refuse in advance: 62
1/03Percentage of U.S. high schools receiving federal aid whose students’ contact information the army sought last fall: 100
Average amount of aid each school district stands to lose if its schools do not supply the information: $762,083
11/03Cotton-subsidy reparations proposed by four African countries at the WTO’s Cancún meeting this fall: $250,000,000
12/03Number of candidates who ran for a school-board seat in the South Mississippi County School District last fall: 1
Number of votes he won: 0
2/03Percentage change since fall 2000 in the number of documents classified by the federal government: +44
2/03Chances that a new student at the University of California at Berkeley last fall had at least one foreign-born parent: 2 in 3
5/03Average factor by which levels of uranium in the urine of Afghan test subjects last fall exceeded normal: 25
8/03Ratio of Iran’s military budget to the amount spent by the Pentagon since last fall for “increased worldwide posture”: 1:1
1/04Estimated number of times a one-year-old was bitten by his peers at a Croatian day-care center one morning last fall: 30
12/04Estimated number of Britons sent government warnings last fall of their increased chance of having mad cow disease: 6,000
5/04Estimated percentage of French schoolgirls who wore an Islamic head scarf to school last fall: 0.02
5/04Number of suspensions a Dallas-area high school handed out last fall for dress-code violations: 1,116
6/04Minimum U.S. spending on missile defense each year since President Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech: $2,700,000,000
Number of the ten missile-defense components to be deployed this fall that have been field-tested as a system: 0
9/04Months before anyone filed an amicus brief supporting a 2002 habeas corpus suit on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees: 10
Number of amicus briefs filed once the case was accepted by the Supreme Court last fall: 17
11/05Percentage change during the presidency of George W. Bush, before Hurricane Katrina hit this fall: +107
11/05Percentage margin by which an MTV awards-show poll for best-dressed male attendee was decided this fall: 1
2/05Number of U.K. Guardian readers who signed up last fall to write pro-Kerry letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio: 14,000
Number of Ohio counties besides Clark that switched from backing Al Gore in 2000 to backing President Bush in 2004: 0
2/05Estimated number of Florida homeowners who signed contracts last year forbidding them to complain about their homes: 4,000
4/05Number of U.S. residents convicted of “international terrorism” between fall 2001 and fall 2003: 184
4/05Length, in miles, of a rubber hose used until last fall to smuggle vodka from Belarus to Lithuania: 2
1/06Portion of its currency reserves that Venezuela says it transferred from U.S. banks to Swiss banks last fall: 2/3
2/06Minutes that the library in Malmö, Sweden, “lent” a gay man and a Muslim cleric for conversation last fall: 45
3/06Amount paid last fall for a Ford Escort driven by Pope John Paul II: $680,000
1/08Chance that a red lipstick tested by a Washington advocacy group last fall contained dangerous levels of lead: 1 in 3
11/08Total votes cast online last fall to decide which Thanksgiving turkeys President Bush should pardon: 27,726
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
1/09Minimum number of calls the FBI received in fall 2001 from Utah residents claiming to have seen Osama bin Laden: 20