Conversation starters for those who want to impress, digress and ingest the facts of life.

	Issue #8
	Issue #7
	Issue #6
	Issue #5
	Issue #4
	Issue #3
	Issue #2
	Issue #1

Icebreakers—Issue #8

This issue's stumper
Q. What was Mickey Mouse's original name?
A. Mortimer Mouse

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 500,000 = number of liposuction procedures performed on men and women in 2004 (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery)
• 87,000 = number of people killed by the Oct. 8 Pakistan earthquake (AP)
• 24, 18 = percentages, respectively, of consumers who plan to reduce, increase holiday spending (Consumer Federation of America)
• 5,299 = student enrollment in America's largest high school — Belmont H.S., Los Angeles (National Center for Education Statistics)
• 10 = percentage of bank holdups by women (Federal crime statistic, reported in Washington Post)

Nick, ole boy
There's a reason why St. Nicholas has white hair. Here's been around since 270 A.D., or so legend has it. His birthplace: the ancient city of Patras, on the Greek Island of Peloponnesos.

Although it took quite a few years before he switched from toga to snappy red suit, he was a good soul and miracle worker from the get-go. He saved girls from prostitution by dropping gold coins in their stockings, calmed stormy seas through prayer and, according to one legend, brought back to life three children who had been murdered by an innkeeper.

About 1000 A.D., St. Nick lost his boyish, smooth-cheeked visage and donned a beard. By then, he was a celebrated gift giver in Russia, England and Germany. Six hundred-plus years later, Dutch settlers brought him to the New World. They called him "Sintirklass," a name that, over time and to English settlers, became Santa Claus.

As popular as St. Nick was, he really hit the big time in 1848, when the book "The Night Before Christmas" was published. As visions of sugarplums danced in children's heads, visions of bucks danced in the heads of advertisers. They had stumbled upon a great marketing tool. Pretty soon, they created for him a made-to-order wife — Mrs. Claus —, some elves and a workshop in the North Pole.

Nonetheless, no matter how much Madison Avenue has tried to corrupt him, he remains St. Nick, a genuinely nice guy who works hard and travels far one night a year, without asking for anything in return.

Sixes of yesteryear

1906 — San Francisco earthquake hits; U.S. Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts passed

1916 — U.S. buys Virgin Islands from Denmark; establishes military government in Dominican Republic

1926 — Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises published; Army Air Corps established

1936 — Boulder Dam completed; Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind published

1946 — Philippines gains independence from U.S.; 400,000 U.S. mine workers go on strike

1956 — First transatlantic cable activated; Federal interstate highway system inaugurated

1966 — Medicare begins; first black U.S. senator in 85 years elected (Edward Brooke, R-MA)

1976 — U.S. celebrates 200th anniversary of independence; Viking II lands on Mars

1986 — Martin Luther King, Jr. day observed for the first time; space shuttle Challenger explodes, kills six astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe

1996 — Unabomber Ted Kaczynski arrested; Sharon Lucid completes 180-day space voyage, a record for women and U.S. astronauts

2006 — ?

Try using this word in conversation
Nympholepsy (NIM fuh lep see) — In ancient days, the frenzied, ecstatic state one experienced when catching sight of a nymph. Today, a frenzied yearning for the unattainable. For example: "Many of the young men who peruse Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue suffer from nympholepsy."

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Icebreakers—Issue #7

This month's stumper
Q. What were the two most popular mass-produced industrial machines in WWI?
A. The sewing machine and machine gun.

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 60 = the percentage of the Netherlands population living below sea level
• 475 = the number of mail-order home models Sears sold between 1904 and 1940
• 300 = the number of pieces of e-mail in thousands that the White House receives weekly
• 80 = the number of competitors in the 2005 international Extreme Ironing (as in ironing board) competition
• 74 = the number of consumers who prefer to contact companies by phone regarding customer service issues

Watch where you put your hands
We all use hand gestures to say hello and goodbye, and add emphasis to our words. You may have to rethink your expressiveness when traveling abroad, however. For example:

• Using the AOK sign is an insult in many Latin American countries.
• Raising your palm to make a stop sign is considered, in Italy, a confrontational push; in West Africa it is considered worse than a middle finger.
• Putting your hands in your pockets while talking is considered impolite in Indonesia, France and Japan.
• Circling your forefinger next to your ear may means to you that someone in crazy, but in Argentina, it can also mean you have a phone call.

Guess who
Born in 1811, she was the seventh of nine children. Her father was a preacher, but as much as she loved him, his talk of sin and damnation was, well, a turn-off. She, herself, had a zest for life and loved to slip away from the parsonage to lie in the grass and read.

In 1832, her father moved the family to Cincinnati, OH, which was then considered the West. He became the first president of the Lane Theological seminary. Its first professor, a Biblical scholar, would later become her husband. As she wrote to a friend the night before her wedding, she felt "nothing at all." She was 25, however, and likely feeling pressure to marry.

The marriage was a difficult one. Her husband was fat, forgetful, fussy and haunted by phantoms. Nonetheless, he supported her writing abilities. Little by little, she began selling articles to "Godey's Lady's Book," one of the most influential women's magazines of the 19th Century. She earned $2 a page, which was more than her family earned taking in borders. Still, no one other than her husband took her seriously.

Years later, her family moved to Maine. They were broke; she was 40 and pregnant again. Still, she continued to scribble at the kitchen table, her children at her feet. Eventually, those scribbles became the book that would make her famous and help galvanize the abolishment movement.

The book would take a year to write, and she expected to make no money from it. According to her publisher, the subject matter was too unpopular and the book too long. Nonetheless, it sold 300,000 copies within a year. In England, sales were more stupendous: 1.5 million copies in about 18 months. It was translated into 37 languages.

She, herself, said she didn't write the book, that God had written it through her. Whatever the case, it brought slavery out into the open and put it into human terms; it also ensured her place in history.

The book: "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The author: Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Try using this word in conversation
Triskaidekaphobia (tris keye dek uh FO bee uh)—fear of the number 13. Example: "In all his 35 years in practice, Dr. Phelps had never seen such a severe case of triskaidekaphobia."

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Icebreakers—Issue #6

This month's stumper
Q. How many trips, annually, do Americans take getting to and from work?
A. 51.3 billion

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 55 = Percentage of U.S. workers who are bored at work and feel underutilized
• 23, 37 = respectively, the percentage of adults who say math was their favorite, most hated subject in school
• 22 = number of states that have passed anti-bullying laws since 1999
• 30-plus = the age of today's largest segment (58 percent) of music buyers
• 20 = the number of e-mail messages sent daily, in billions

Elephant trivia

• lives 50-70 years
• gestation is 22 months
• weighs 175-220 pounds at birth
• feeds for about 18 hours a day
• eats 300-plus pounds of vegetation daily
• sleeps four hours a night, generally from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.
• holds ears out straight when happy
• has 40,000 muscles in its trunk
• can hold 3 gallons of water in trunk

Guess who

She was born in New York, two years before the American Revolution, into a prominent Anglican family who traced their lineage to the early colonists. She married into a prominent family as well, her husband a prosperous merchant and an Episcopalian. Ultimately, his business went bankrupt, and they lost their possessions and home. Her husband also contracted tuberculosis.

Desperate to restore his health, the couple sailed for Italy. Upon arrival, however, they were quarantined for a month. Two weeks after their release, her husband died. She was 29 and the mother of five.

It was in Italy that she was exposed to Catholicism, and when she returned to the States, she began to learn more about the religion. Despite tremendous opposition from her family, she converted.

Rampant anti-Catholic prejudice prevented her from beginning a school for boys; family members distrusted her influence on their children; she struggled to support her children.

Then Providence intervened. A wealthy seminarian and convert who had purchased 269 rural acres of land in North-central Maryland asked her to establish a Catholic school for needy girls. In doing so, she founded the Sisters of Charity, the first community for religious women in America. Some two centuries later, she was the first native-born North American to be canonized. Pope Paul VI did the honors in 1975.

She is Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton.

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Icebreakers—Issue #5

This month's stumper
Q. What was the very first book Amazon sold online?
A. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 75 = percentage of toys sold in the United States that come from China (AP).
• 20 = percentage of older Americans whose sole income comes from Social Security (Washington Post).
• 883,000 = total weight (in tons) of metropolitan L.A.'s population (Harper's).
• 14 = percentage of world's cell phone users who say they've interrupted sex to answer their phones (Harper's).
• 6.3, 48 = respectively: annual number of U.S. pregnancies; percentage that are unintended (Alan Guttmacher Institute).

Is your milk causing air pollution?
No joke. When cows eat grass, they pass gas, and it's pretty potent stuff. How potent? That's the subject of debate — and research.

Some 3 million cows live in California, the vast majority in the Central Valley, which just so happens to have some of the worst air pollution in the country. But are cows the culprits, or are cars?

It's a multibillion-dollar question, because new emissions standards for cows are soon to be set by the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. The present standard, set in 1938, is 12.8 pounds of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) per cow, per year. The District is recommending that the standard be raised to 20.6; the dairy industry wants it lowered to about 5 pounds.

Which standard is correct? Who's to say, although University of California researchers do know this: It's rumination, the cows' digestive process, that's to blame.

Apparently, when cows eat, food goes into their stomachs, mixes with bacteria and begins to break down, producing the gas methane. Twenty minutes later, the food comes back up, this time as cud. Cows chew the cud and methane is released (along with VOCs methanol and ethanol). Get 3 million cows together and ... well, you do the math. It's no wonder then, that this issue has caused a big stink.

Elvis trivia

• weighed 4.98 pounds at birth
• born in town of 6,000 (Tupelo, Miss.)
• lucky number was 8
• wore size 12 combat boot
• received 282 teddy bears for Christmas in 1956
• had 6 layers in his five-foot-tall wedding cake
• was prescribed 5,684 narcotic and amphetamine pills between Jan. 20 to Aug. 16, 1977
• had 49 cars in his funeral procession

Try using this word in conversation
Funambulist (fyooh NAM byuh list) — a tightrope artist. Example: "I would make a great funambulist if I weren't afraid of heights."

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Icebreakers—Issue #4

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 15 = percentage of male workers who generate more problem-solving ideas in an office environment that includes plants and flowers.
• 47 = number of days Matisse's painting "The Boat" hung upside in New York's Museum of Modern Art before someone noticed the mistake.
• 90, 53 and 5 = the number of gallons of water the average American, European and Saharan African uses daily, respectively.
• 50 = percentage of arsonists who are younger than 21.
• 1 in 10 = chance that a tsunami will hit the U.S. Pacific Northwest in the next 30 years.

Did you know?

• The toes of mummies are wrapped individually.
• Indiana University is the world's premier repository of fruit flies, which are beloved by genetics researchers.
• It wasn't until 1995 that astronomers discovered the first planet outside of our solar system. Since then, they've discovered 145.
• Long hair on men is a no-no in North Korea. There, the government recently launched a TV campaign ridiculing long-haired "nonconformists" as unhygienic and anti-socialist fools, and broadcast their names and addresses. (BTW, anything over two inches is considered long; older men, however, are allowed an extra four-fifths of an inch to hide baldness.)

Blackmail — a short, sad history
According to some, the practice began in Scotland hundreds of years ago by the English, who owned much of the land and charged Scots a "mail" to farm it. Payment was to be made in silver and was referred to as "white mail." Farmers who couldn't raise the money paid in produce, which became known as "black mail."

Dishonest creditors began taking advantage of farmers, demanding goods in excess of the amounts owed and backed their demands with threats. Over time, the term came to be known as "black mail."

Guess who
He's considered by some to be one of the most important writers of the 20th Century and certainly one of its most colorful.

He was raised in Brooklyn, schooled at Harvard and fought in the Philippines in World War II. The latter inspired his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), for which he won his first of two Pulitzers.

Over the years, he has produced more than 40 books, done stints as a director and playwright, and co-founded the New York's Village Voice, one of the country's first alternative weeklies. He ran for mayor of New York, married six times, got divorced five times, stabbed wife #2 and had numerous run-ins with the law.

Today he is plagued by arthritis but as ornery as ever. He's also $2.5 million richer, having recently sold 20,000 pounds of his letters, manuscripts and assorted papers for $2.5 million.

He is Norman Mailer.

Try using this word in conversation
Ratiocinate (rash ee OS uh nate) — to reason. Example: "We must rid ourselves of bias and preconceptions if we are to ratiocinate."

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Icebreakers—Issue #3

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 67 = jump in percentage of seniors who go online (since 2000)
• 15 and 2 = respective percentages of workers who describe themselves as neat freaks and slobs, as reported by Steelcase Inc.
• 2.87 = minutes of average cell phone call
• 2 = number of U.S. states in which it is legal to shoot fish with a semi-automatic rifle
• 10:1 = ratio of the typical salary of a paid gladiator in Ancient Rome to that of a doctor or lawyer today

Weird careers
If you don't mind standing around, why not get paid for it? You may have to move to Washington, D.C., however, where professional line-standers make about $10 to $35 an hour.

Most simply, line-standers are placeholders for lobbyists, lawyers and legislative assistants who want to sit up front at congressional or Supreme Court hearings but don't have the time or inclination to wait in line. Line-standers get their jobs through line-standing companies, and while they have to be on-call, the work isn't steady. Congress isn't always in session and its members take long weekends, leaving just a three-day week for line-standers to clock their hours.

Before September 11, competition among line-standers was fierce as they raced through halls, underground tunnels and little-used entrances to claim a spot. Now, with security tight, the playing field has been leveled. They each walk through the same door; first one in is first on line, etc.

What personality traits must you have to be a line-standard? None in particular, though it's helpful to have comfortable shoes, patience and a strong bladder.

How to talk about the weather (and not put anyone to sleep)
Talking about the weather doesn't have to be boring, not when there's so much weather out there. For example:

• Should someone say: "I can't believe how cloudy/sunny it's been." You can say: "True, but did you know that Astoria, OR, and Quillayute, WA, are the cloudiest spots in the U.S., with 239 cloudy days a year? Or that Yuma, AZ, is sunny 90 percent of the year? Yuma also is the warmest U.S. city, with an average temperature of 124 degrees."

• Should someone say: "My, it's so wet/dry out." You can say: "Ha! That's nothing. Did you know that in 1929, Death Valley set a record for the least amount of precipitation in the U.S. — 0 inches? Or that in 1979, Alvin, TX, set the record for the most rain ever to fall in 24 hours — 43 inches?"

• Should someone say: "It's too darn cold." You can say: "Quit complaining. You're lucky you don't live in Barrow, Alaska, the nation's coldest city, with an average annual temperature of 10.4 degrees. Then again, you could be in Prospect Creek, Alaska, which holds the country's coldest record — minus 80 degrees."

• Should someone say: "The wind nearly blew me away! You can say: "What a wimp! You'd be long gone if you were at the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, which clocked the strongest wind ever measured on earth: 231 mph.

Guess who
Arrogant, egotistical, irritable and opinionated. These were just some of the words used to describe the man who seemed anything but promising as a child. He did poorly at school, had few friends and made a mess of his family's business. Luckily, one of his professors understood his brilliance and became his tutor. From there the young man thrived.

He invented calculus and the reflecting telescope, spent decades exploring theories of motion but refused to publish (for fear of ridicule) or share his knowledge with fellow scientists. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to publish Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, one of the most important scientific works of all time.

He was Isaac Newton, who today is credited not only for having apples fall on his head but also for laying the foundation of modern physical science.

Try using this word in conversation
Consanguineous marriage (kon sang GWIN e us). Marriage between relatives, e.g., first cousins. (BTW, 20 states and the District of Columbia allow cousins to marry; six more permit it under certain circumstances.)

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Icebreakers—Issue #2

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 80:1 = ratio of number of people living in Haiti to the number of the country's permanent full-time jobs
• 406 = longest golf drive in yards reported in the PGA record book (made by Jack Hamm in 1986)
• 5 to 10 years = the number of years by which eccentrics outlive conformists; study finds eccentrics are more stress-free
• 90 = percentage of U.S. adults who say they multi-task
• 10,000 = number of Americans who turn 50 each day
• $4 = the per person charge for dinner and dancing at the inaugural ball of James Madison, who was the first president to hold one

Book pic
"Horse and Buggy Driver's Manual," prepared by the Lancaster County (PA) Planning Department, and the state's police and Department of Transportation. Everything you need to know about how to drive your buggy more safely on roads dominated by motor vehicles. No joke: 180 buggy accidents and 18 fatalities have occurred in the four years ending in 2000, most of them in Lancaster County, where a large number of Amish reside.

Guidelines worth noting: Buggies have the right of way but should not hog the road. They must have large, orange reflective triangles on their rears, signifying they are slow-moving vehicles, and four-way, battery-charged flashing lights. They should not bunch up when leaving a church or forming a funeral procession. Child seats are not required.

Good news
For ladies only: Tired of being sexually harassed on packed subway cars during the morning commute? Move to Tokyo, where women-only cars were introduced by the Japan East Railway Company. The cars run on the JR Saikyo Line, which is known for its high incidence of groping. Young school boys and handicapped men may also use the cars. If they keep their hands to themselves.

Guess who
One of the most influential health U.S. reformers of the 19th Century, he was a Presbyterian minister concerned about the havoc being wreaked by industrialization, disease, immorality and the erosion of traditional family values. His solution: Eat right to live right; live right and you cure society's ills.

He promoted a strict vegetarian diet, including unsifted, unrefined bread, which, alas, was increasingly unavailable. Americans in the 1830s had begun buying their bread commercially because it was more convenient and less costly than fueling their stoves. (Little did they know that commercial bakers were adding plaster of Paris, pipe clay, chalk and a host of other ingredients to make the bread appear whiter and more uniform.)

Boardinghouses baring his name and featuring his diet popped up across the country. Schools like Oberlin College in Ohio mandated that students eat his specially formulated bread and refrain from using spices. Newspaperman Horace Greeley and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison sang his praises. So did John D. Rockefeller and John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek fame, whose first cold cereal, Granula, was really just the reformer's bread broken into pieces and rebaked.

The reformer was Sylvester Graham (1704 - 1851). Who knew his Graham Crackers would find their way into millions of lunchboxes (along with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with — what else? — white bread)?

Try using this word in conversation
Forisfamiliation (for-is-fah-mil-ee AY-shuhn) — Procedure under Scottish Law by which it is recognized that a child has flown the family nest and is prepared to set off on his or her own.

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Icebreakers—Issue #1

Facts and figures you may (or may never) need

• 52 = average number of clothing items an adult American acquired in 2002
  
• 8.3, 8.2 = average age men and women, respectively, stop believing in Santa Claus
  
• 30% = price that seafood can rise or fall in one day, based on weather alone
  
• 87,000 = number of Americans awaiting donor organs
  
• 20 = percentage by which British university graduates are less likely than non-graduates to phone their mothers regularly
  
• 1,700 = the number of images taken during a 15-minute CT scan of King Tut's mummy

Guess who
His article "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" is ridiculed upon publication in 1919. In it he suggests that you could send a small vehicle to the moon using rockets. He thereafter decides to lay low, lest he be subjected to more ridicule. Good move, as the American scientific community wants nothing to do with such idiocy. The man: Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), after whom NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, is named. (BTW, his far-fetched idea pays off in 1968, when the first U.S. spacecraft enters the lunar orbit. A year later, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon.)

Good news
Ninety percent of all American households give to charity. In fact, the average contributions represent 3 percent of household income, or $1,620.

Bad news
Laptop computers can have an adverse effect on sperm development and fertility, according to a report in the journal Human Reproduction. Laptops, it seems, can raise testicular temperatures by 1.8 to 5.2 degrees. (Laptops themselves can get up to 104ºF within an hour.) How does one avoid scrotal hyperthermia? Work at a desktop, go back to pencil and paper, and/or keep your knees crossed.

What's a black hole anyway?
A black hole is a lump of matter so compressed that nothing — nada — can escape it, be it light, heat, radio waves or Paris Hilton. That's why it appears black. How did it get that way? The theory is that black holes are really stars running on empty. More technically, they've run out of the nuclear fuel that fires up younger stars and makes them shine. Another thing to know about black holes: Steer clear. Because their gravitational pull is so strong, they would suck you up like a Dirt Devil.

Try using this word in conversation
Soubrette — a coquettish maidservant in a play or opera.

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