Barbie: "Got meat?"

Let me say this about that.

Just let me get this out.  I am sick to death of turning on the TV and instantly seeing Barack Obama blathering on about some new miracle he is going to perform for the American people.  This guy spends more time on television than the ‘OxyClean’ pitchman or that other annoying asshole …. “my name is Doug and I have mesothelioma.” Obama has spent his entire first term in the White House actively campaigning for a second term – or – going on vacation.  Well I’ve had it.  I’ve turned off the TV and have taken up web-surfing as my primary method of wasting time.

As it turns out, web surfing can produce a treasure trove of interesting stuff – especially if you are a serious player of ‘Trivial Pursuit’. For example, the national debt has been getting a lot of coverage lately.  Did you know that in 1789, the entire national debt of these United States was a paltry $190,000?  Today, the average household debt (for just one family) is $118,000 !!!  As for the current national debt, fahgetaboutit  …… it’s somewhere north of a gazillion billion quadrillion dollars.

Oh, here’s an interesting fact.  It seems that 80% of all the past winners of the ‘Publisher’s Clearing House’ $10 million give-away, did not buy any magazines.  Is that cool, or what?  Makes you wonder why they do it.

There are a lot of interesting facts concerning languages.  It is a little known fact that the shortest complete sentence in the English language is ………….    “Go.” OK, maybe that isn’t so interesting, but I’ve got some better ones.

The ‘Wikipedia’ web site has become the ‘go-to’ source in America for interesting stuff that is mostly true.  In America today, rumor is given far greater credence than any fact-based source, which probably explains the growth in ‘Wikipedia’ popularity.  Since “Facts” lifted off the ‘Wikipedia’ site have as much credibility as anything you hear on TV, I can forgive their occasional minor lapses in the old ‘Encyclopedia Britiannia’ focus on rigid fact checking.  It was on ‘Wikipedia’ that I found the most interesting facts about languages.  I presume most are true.

For example, did you know that there are more Spanish speakers in the United States (50 million) than there are in Spain (46 million)?  Projections for U.S. based Spanish speakers in the next 10 years are HUGE !!!  It seems that when we took California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas away from Mexico a couple of hundred years ago, we didn’t know we were gonna give them back to the Mexicans in 2020.

The English language is not, however, going out of style.  It’s only going out of style in America – and – England.  There are only 60 million speakers of the English language in England, but in India, there are 125 million !!

OK, OK I can hear some of you out there stifling yawns, so I will move on to something that is guaranteed to get your attention – SEX.  It’s a cheap trick, but sure to garner multitudinous hits on this web page.

Interesting SEX fact # 1 ….. somewhere on the planet Earth, there are 120,000,000 acts of sexual intercourse occurring every day.  These sex acts produce an average of 288,000 babies per day.  And, as we have already discovered in the United States, the majority of these babies will speak Spanish.

Interesting SEX fact # 2 ….. sexual activity is not distributed evenly across all nations.  As it turns out, a survey by the respected health web site “MedIndia”, claims that the most sexually active males in the world are actually Americans, performing the sex act an average of 124 times per year.  Near the bottom of the list are the Japanese men, performing their manly duty a mere 36 times per year.  Upon informing Mrs. Shambo of this ‘most interesting fact’, her response was ……… “I wonder which are happier – the American women or the Japanese women?” It took me a few minutes to decipher the full range of implications of her question.

Interesting SEX fact # 3 ….. of all the nations in the world, Australian women are more likely to have sex on a first date than women from any other country.  And I always thought the Aussie expression … ‘throwing meat on the Barbie’ … had something to do with Bar-B-Que.

And, that’s all I have to say about that.

Shambo