--BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE

 

…Hey, you.  Merry Christmas.
I hope it’s not too cold where you are and that you’re safe and poised for a wonderful day.

There is actually a layer of snow covering everything here--roofs and docks, the evergreens flocked white.  It looks like a postcard made specifically for Christmas.  I wish you could see it.

…My Christmas present to you is a list of very random, and some very unsettling, things I learned over the last couple of weeks.  Here they are…

 

-Honey bees dance to tell other honey bees where the food source is.

-The average age of a Seattle sex traffic girl is 14 to 15 years old.

-80% of heroin users started out taking opioids.

-The United States has 270 million guns and had 90 mass shooters between 1966 and 2012. No other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shooters.  Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American.

-America has the highest recidivism rate in the world.  80% of all prisoners are re-arrested within five years of their release.

-45% of Americans don’t have money saved in a retirement account.

-The average American has credit card debt of $15,564.

-The app, Candy Crush, generates $6 million a day.

-More than 10,000 different languages are spoken in Africa.

-The longest recorded bout of hiccups lasted 68 years.

-Officially, the Mexican government acknowledges the disappearances of more than 30,000 people — men, women and children trapped in a liminal abyss — neither dead nor alive, silent victims of the drug war.

-The richest 1% of the world’s population now owns more than 50% of the world’s wealth.  There are now 36 million millionaires in the world.  The US leads the way with 15.3 million people worth at least $1 million.  Japan ranks second with 2.7.

-Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” sold a few weeks ago for $450.3 million with fees, a record for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed the sale of Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015.

-There are over 3 million lakes in Canada.

-Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, passed the $100 billion in wealth over Thanksgiving weekend.  It would take the combined wealth of 160 million Americans to equal the net worth of the world’s three richest people—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett.

-Mark Zuckerberg made $5 billion in two weeks.

-This year on Black Friday the FBI received 204,000 requests for instant gun background checks, an increase of 10% the year before.