SCIENCE: WATER

Water is a magnet.

SCIENCE: COCKROACHES

You think cockroaches and you think of squalor, but cockroaches are actually cleaner than humans and cats. In a squalid place they will actually be cleaner than their surroundings because they constantly secrete a disinfectant. Knowing this doesn't make me welcome cockroaches though, and I doubt it would've swayed Howard Hughes. If cleanliness is next to Godliness as they say what does that say about God and roaches?

ENTERTAINMENT: STEELY DAN

The band Steely Dan, whose hits include "Reelin’ In The Years," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," "Bodhisattva," "Peg" and "Hey Nineteen," took its name from a dildo.

NUMBERS: A TRILLION

Our national debt is said to be in the trillions. A trillion is 1 followed by 12 zeroes. Jerome R. Corsi, at the World Net Daily website http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=88903, gives this perspective of a trillion dollars:

If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, 365 days a year, it would take you until October 2737 to lose $1 trillion.

If you spent $1 million a day, every day since Jesus was born, you would still be only slightly more that [sic] three-quarters of the way to spending $1 trillion.

One trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans comes out to $3,333 per person.

One trillion one-dollar bills stacked one on top of the other would reach nearly 68,000 miles into the sky, about a third of the way from the Earth to the moon.

Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to contain about 200 billion stars. So, if each star cost one dollar, one trillion dollars would buy five Milky Way galaxies full of stars.

One trillion seconds of ordinary clock time equals 31,546 years. So, spending money at the rate of one dollar every second, or $86,400 every day, would still take nearly 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion.

If someone were to build city blocks that contained 10 homes valued at $100,000 per home, you would end up with ten houses to a block, ten blocks to a mile and a hundred blocks per square mile. It would take 10,000 square miles to reach $1 trillion in value. This would be more than the size of six U.S. states: Vermont, 9,615 square miles; New Hampshire, 9,351 square miles; New Jersey, 8,722 square miles; Connecticut, 5,544 square miles; Delaware, 1,954 square miles; and Rhode Island, 1,545 square miles.

Craig Smith, founder and CEO of Swiss America, estimates it would take approximately four generations of Americans to pay off the interest of the U.S. Treasury bonds sold as debt to create the $1 trillion stimulus package, factoring in a 3 percent growth rate in the economy throughout that time.

The U.S. national debt now exceeds $10 trillion according to the according to the U.S. National Debt Clock, at Times Square in New York City.

With the estimated population of the United States at 305,556,415 people, each citizen's share of the national debt is $34,769.40.

Here's a digital image of one trillion elves from http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?p=5263:

The links below have illustrations of how a cube of one trillion pennies would look next to a football field, the Lincoln Memorial, The Washington Monument, the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower: http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/fourteen.asp

Here is a cube of one quadrillion pennies: http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/seventeen.asp

Do you want to see a cube of quintillion pennies? Here you go:
http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/eighteen.asp

PEOPLE: D.L. HUGHLEY

The comedian D.L. Hughley was a Bloods gang member in his early teens. He left the gang after his cousin, a Crip, was shot. The cousin survived, as I recall. [Source: an old Time magazine article. I don't recall the magazine date. I just recall that it was in the mid or late '90s.]

PEOPLE: BROOKE SHIELDS

"They turn me on," Brooke Shields once said with a devious grin on The Arsenio Hall Show when the show's namesake mentioned farts. I figure she was joking, but ya never know. She would be neither the first nor the last person to have that fetish or any other fetish. The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love (how appropriate) describes fetishes you may not have even heard of. I forget how Arsenio inserted that subject into the conversation. That was years ago, and I have a hard enough time remembering last night. Speaking of Brooke Shields I once interned with a girl who resembled a Latina Brooke Shields. She was a Trinity University (the "Ivy League School of The South") student with a coy, upper-crust persona and some weird word choices. Speaking of a past boyfriend she said, "I kicked the bucket with him," meaning they broke up. Some years later I saw her and her groom in the wedding pages. In the accompanying article they described their getting married as getting "Froot Looped." I imagine some fellas will get "Froot Looped" while seeing that picture of Brooke Shields.

PEOPLE: JANIS JOPLIN

Rock belter Janis Joplin was originally a country singer in her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas.

PEOPLE: GREGORY HINES

The late dancing legend Gregory Hines' father was African-American. His mother was of Portugese, Jewish, Irish and Panamanian descent. [Source: Biography magazine, March 2001]

SCIENCE: LYSOL

Lysol is nearly 80% ethanol. You could probably drink it if it weren't for its other active and inert ingredients. [Source: The ingredient list on a can of Lysol in my home]

SCIENCE: ALPHA CENTAURI

The nearest galaxy to ours is Alpha Centauri, which is nearly 25,000,000,000,000 miles away. A spacecraft launched from Earth and traveling at 23,000 miles an hour, which is achievable, would take six months to reach the sun, which is 93,000,000 miles away. It would take that spacecraft more than 100,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

It takes light from the sun 4.2 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Why the big difference? Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. A light-year, the distance that light travels in a year, is 5,900,000,000,000 miles. One minute is 60 seconds. One hour is 60 minutes. A day is 24 hours. A year is 365 days. You might need a scientific calculator to do the math. [Source: Will Black Holes Devour the Universe? & 100 Other Questions & Answers About Astronomy by Melanie Melton]

SCIENCE: JUPITER

Jupiter comprises 70 percent of all mass in our solar system. The sun's the only larger celestial body in our solar system.
Jupiter is 11 times larger than planet Earth. So, 11 Earths would fit around Jupiter's diameter.
A hollow Jupiter could hold 1400 planet Earths. [Source: Will Black Holes Devour the Universe? & 100 Other Questions & Answers About Astronomy by Melanie Melton]

If Jupiter were a bit larger it would become a star. How? Star formation starts with a cloud of hydrogen (nebulae). The hydrogen is confined to one part of the cloud. The cloud's mass increases gradually with the hydrogen concentration. That increase in mass increases the gravity, which traps more hydrogen. The crowding of hydrogen atoms generates heat. Eventually, the tremendous heat and pressure from the crowding causes nuclear fusion. When four hydrogen atoms are fused into one helium atom it produces a nuclear explosion. (This was the science first applied during the World War II atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Stars, such as the sun, have giant nuclear explosions occurring constantly. Just imagine millions of massive nuclear explosions occurring every second at once and you get the picture. Earth receives these bursts of energy from the sun as light and heat. Like the planets Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the stars, Jupiter is comprised of mostly hydrogen gas--and no solid surface. Although it's huge it's still not large enough to start this process. [Source: Will Black Holes Devour the Universe? & 100 Other Questions & Answers About Astronomy by Melanie Melton and a forgotten website.]