Fish is square. Chicken is circle.

This feature is comprised of factoids and statistics which paint a numerical portrait of Americana, pop culture, and the modern world. An installment has appeared in every issue of K Composite.

SELECT ISSUE NUMBER: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 3

FROM ISSUE #11

Fifteen NFL players have won Olympic gold medals in other events.

The following five actors from the Poltergeist films all died shortly after their work on the films was completed: Heather O'Rourke, the child actress who played the innocent Carol Ann Freeling, complained of abdominal pains on February 1, 1988. She was taken to Children's Hospital of San Diego, where it was discovered she was suffering from intestinal stenosis - a severe bowel obstruction she apparently had from birth. The obstruction caused an infection which caused septic shock, and subsequently a total cardiac and pulmonary arrest. She died the same day during surgery at age 12. Her mother later filed a wrongful death suit against Heather’s physicians alleging that an early misdiagnosis prevented proper treatment of Heather’s curable condition. Dominique Dunne played Dana Freeling (Carol Ann's big sister). She died at age 22 on November 14, 1982, four days after her boyfriend choked her into a coma from which she never awoke. Noel Conlon played the husband of a couple shopping for a house in the neighborhood. He died January 25, 1993. Julian Beck died of stomach cancer on September 14, 1985, at age 60, after his role as Kane, an evil spirit in Poltergeist II. Will Sampson, who played the good spirit of Talyor in the same film, died on June 3, 1987, at age 53, six weeks after a heart-lung transplant.

The shutter speed in a Polaroid iZone camera is 1/125 second, and the film is ISO 640. The aperture settings on the main switch are as follows: “Indoor with flash” is ƒ10, “Cloudy with flash” is ƒ12.5, and “Sunny without flash” is ƒ34.5.

Handguns are the weapon of choice for US murderers. In 1998, handguns were used to murder 7,361 Americans, while “knives or cutting instruments” trailed in second place with only 1,877 slayings. If you never believed those dorks who say things like, “These fists are lethal weapons, dude,” well, some of them were telling the truth. 949 Americans were murdered in 1998 by aggressors who did it with their hands and feet.

More than 9,000 Kentucky students drop out of high school each year. More than 100 native Kentuckians have become governors of other states.

Sunglasses were first developed for 15th Century Chinese judges to conceal the movement of their eyes during testimony.

In August 1995, an inmate escaped from the State Prison of Vridsloeselille, Denmark, and returned 26 days later to ask if he could be readmitted.

The main external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle is 154 feet long and 28 feet in diameter. The tank is discharged when empty and disintegrates in the atmosphere when falling back to Earth. For the early 1983 Shuttle missions the tank was covered in white Latex paint to match the rest of the ship. Later missions have been launched with an unpainted tank. This removes more than 600 pounds from the total liftoff weight. Any weight removed from the craft itself is weight that can be added to cargo. On the sixth mission, a new tank design was employed which removed an additional 11,000 pounds from the total weight. Another redesign in 1998 removed yet another 7,000 pounds.

China has over 65,000 movie theaters, more than any other country. The US is in second place with 34,186. Iceland has the most screens per capita; 165.2 screens for every one million residents. Sweden is second with 131.3, followed by the US with 128.3. With nearly 3 billion annual tickets purchased, India is home to the world’s largest movie audience. The annual attendance in the United States is about half of what it is in India.

Walt Disney originally used the name Mortimer Mouse before changing the name to Mickey Mouse.

Stairs are five times more dangerous than elevators which are ranked as the safest form of mechanical transportation. Elevators have an unmatched record of less than one fatality during every 100,000,000 miles traveled.

In 1801, ninety percent of the world’s population lived in agricultural communities.

The state of New York is home to forty NPR member stations, more than any other state.

The American Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a writer for the boys’ magazine Youth’s Companion.

A Henri Matisse painting was once inadvertently displayed upside down at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than six weeks before the management was alerted to the error.

In 1555, Nostradamus wrote, “Come the millennium, month 12, in the home of greatest power, the village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed the leader.”

Three times as many Americans can name the Three Stooges individually than can name three justices of the US Supreme Court.

From March 1956 to March 1962, Elvis Presley released thirty singles, all of which became Top 10 hits. This is still the longest string of consecutive Top 10 hits in history. No other artist has even come close. The Beatles are in second place with twenty Top 10 hits in a row.

In 1893, the Chicago Columbian Exposition included a 250-foot-tall ride made of steel and wood. George W. Ferris, a bridge engineer from Pennsylvania, created this attraction which was dubbed The Ferris Wheel.

Despite being 650 miles from the nearest ocean, Louisville, Kentucky, holds a distinction as the world’s eighth largest cargo port, primarily because it is a central hub for the United Parcel Service.

In baseball, a player’s batting average is calculated by dividing the number of hits by the number of times a player was at bat. At .366, Ty Cobb has the highest career batting average.

An Italian film version of the Old Testament was released in theaters in 1922. The film was 13 hours long.

The recording surface inside a cassette tape is a strip of plastic coated with millions of specs of iron oxide. The recording head in the tape deck is an electromagnet which rearranges these particles into patterns which duplicate the patterns of the original sound wave. Digital recordings add another step by converting the sound waves into data. During playback, that information - stored on the tape as ones and zeros - is converted back into sound waves. The sound on a compact disc is stored at 44.1 kHz (or 44,100 pieces of data per second). In theory, every time you playback a digital recording, the reproduction should be identical. A cassette tape, on the other hand, is gradually being erased every time it is played.

South Korean households with VHS players rented an average of 88.6 videocassettes in 1998, more than any other country. At 57.4 video rentals, Taiwan was second. In third place, American VCR owners rented an average of 39.1 VHS tapes. No European or South American countries were in the top ten.

A Holyoke, Massachusetts, YMCA instructor, William Morgan, invented volleyball in 1895. It was his goal to create a game older men could enjoy if they found other games too strenuous.

NFL-sponsored Super Bowl events in 1995 produced 313 tons of garbage.

“Portrait of Dr. Gachet” by 19th Century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh is the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. On May 15, 1990, at Christie’s in New York it brought in $75,000,000.

On average, a person’s skin weighs 24 pounds.

Buenaventura, Colombia, is the wettest inhabited place on Earth and receives an average rainfall of more than 22 feet per year. Aswan, Egypt, is at the other end of the scale, receiving only a half millimeter of annual rainfall.

(SOURCES: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Public Radio, Screen Digest, Popular Music Database, Internet Movie Database, Polaroid, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati, Fabulous Fallacies, Luntz Research Company, Useless Digest, Louisville-Jefferson County Office for Economic Development, It’s a Girl’s Game Too by Alice Siegel and Margo McLoone, Just Curious, Jeeves by Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett, State Prison of Vridsloeselille, Playback: The Story of Recording Devices by Robert K. Krishef, National Football League, Dictionary of Misinformation by Tom Burnam, Christie’s of New York, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital of London, National Climatic Data Center, Major League Baseball.)

FROM ISSUE #10

In 1825, New Harmony, Indiana, became the first place in the United States where boys and girls were taught in the same classes.

Despite all the cellular telephones (or "handies") you see in America every day, the US ranks 22nd in the world in the percentage of its population with wireless service. Topping the list are several vast Scandinavian countries, where land lines are expensive and many of the world's cell phones are manufactured. More than 70% of Finland's 5 million residents use wireless phones, followed by Iceland (65%), Norway (63%), Sweden (61%), and Austria (60%). Today there are 83 million US users which is only 31.8% of the total US population. Ten years ago there were only 4.3 million cell phones in America, less than 2%.

President James Garfield's father Abram was a champion wrestler and died when James was only 18 months old.

One of the world's smallest countries, the Republic of San Marino, has a population of 25,000 squeezed into its 24 square miles. The tiny nation is surrounded on all sides by Italy and entertains over three million tourists and visitors each year.

Strumming a guitar for an hour burns 174 calories.

Actress Mira Sorvino graduated from Harvard in 1989.

Dialing *70 before a telephone number disables Call Waiting service for the duration of the call.

The United States accounts for 5% of the world's population and 24% of the world's prisoners. Only Russia has a larger percentage of its total population imprisoned.

Of the 142 American prisoners executed between 1976 and 1991, 82 were electrocuted, 55 suffered lethal injection, 4 went to the gas chamber, and one was killed by a firing squad.

More than half of US prisoners are functionally illiterate.

In 1998, 43% of US pregnancies were intended and resulted in live births. 29% were unintended or mis-timed and resulted in abortion. 20% were mis-timed and resulted in live births - these were people who wanted to get pregnant, but not at that particular time. 8% were unwanted pregnancies which resulted in live births - people who didn't want to get pregnant, but had the baby anyway. An average of 3.5 million unintended pregnancies occur each year in the US.

Britney Spears loves the music of the Dixie Chicks and Garth Brooks.

In 1976, sales of Elvis Presley's records topped 400 million, a feat which had never been achieved before by any other artist. At the time of his death the following year, Presley had paid more income tax than any other individual American in history.

Kansas grows more wheat than any other state.

In overcrowded Russian prisons, the inmates sleep in shifts so prison capacity can be doubled.

1 in 10 American adults has gone skinny dipping.

Arkansas is the only state which has passed a resolution indicating the proper pronunciation of its name (Ar-kan-saw).

Thirty-six US presidents had taken office before the citizens of Washington DC were permitted to vote in presidential elections.

The oldest public building in the US, the Palace of the Governors, was built in 1610 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

77% of American motorists pump their own gas.

The book "The Little Mermaid" by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen has a different ending than the popular Disney film that was based on it. We don't want to ruin it for you, but the book's ending is not quite as happy as the movie.

61% of the 9.9 million Americans who play the outdoor game of horseshoes are over the age of fifty. 16% are women.

Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO) is the only Native American in Congress. His favorite motorcycle is a 1997 Harley-Davidson Road King.

Friends of Jerry Lee Lewis report that he wears a brand new pair of socks every day.

78% of K Composite readers are age 15 to 24. 57% share the magazine with their friends.

Of all of the men who have served as US vice president, 19 of them were older than the president they served.

The average American worker has 23 cavities. Female workers tend to have more than male workers.

In the forty years from 1951 to 1991, the percentage of hypnotists who practiced their craft for entertainment purposes dropped from 95% to 5%.

7% of Americans are Scorpios, fewer than any other sign.

In 1913, Kansas became the first state to establish a motion picture censorship board.

Evel Kneivel once broke the hands of an author who had written an unflattering and unauthorized biography of the daredevil. Knievel paid damages in court and was dropped from his multimillion dollar contract with Ideal Toys as a result of the bad publicity, but he never apologized.

In 1784, the first commercially available map of the United States was advertised for sale.

On March 31, 1870, Thomas Peterson-Mundy became the first African American to vote under the authority of the fifteenth amendment.

"Fish is square, Chicken is circle" has appeared in every issue of K Composite and got its name from McDonald's Restaurant where the filets for fish and chicken sandwiches look identical when frozen and can be distinguished by their shape.

From 1989 to 1998, the average middle class US family income rose by 9.2% (after being adjusted for inflation). The same families also spent 6.8% more time at work, and the share of married women working full time rose to 46% from 41%.

The first night-scheduled passenger airplane flight left Boston on April 1, 1927.

In 1991, there were 60 million guns in America, one third of which were reported to be kept loaded.

Every 60 seconds, two acres of US farmland are redeveloped for other purposes.

In August 1999, Rick Springfield turned 50.

In the summer of 1971, Elvis Presley bought a $55,000 stretch limousine in California after seeing one in the movie Shaft.

59% of K Composite readers spend more than 20 minutes reading the magazine. 20% spend more than 45 minutes.

The song "Me and Bobbie McGee," made popular by Janis Joplin, was written by Kris Kristofferson.

Residents of Switzerland have the highest average annual per capita income in the world, it's $36,410. At $80 a year, Mozambique has one of the lowest. Of US states, Connecticut has the highest average per capita income at $29,400, and Arkansas has the lowest, $16,900.

At a 1975 concert at the Silver Dome in Pontiac, Michigan, Elvis Presley took in $816,000 which was the highest amount ever earned at a single concert by a single artist.

Type O-positive blood is the most common (37% of Americans) and Type AB-negative is the most rare (less than 1%). 40% of Americans are eligible to donate blood, but only 6% actually do.

44% of American teenagers go out to see a movie at least once a month.

3.2 million US adults have not completed the sixth grade, while 5.3 million have received more than 18 years of formal education including six or more years of college and graduate school.

Jerry Lee Lewis has not received royalties from any of his records since 1959. For more than forty years, while the IRS has been garnishing his royalties, he has been living off of cash from live performances. Now at age 65, he still operates only with cash.

(SOURCES: Fabulous Facts About the Fifty States by Wilma Ross, ABC News, National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Adweek's Marketing Week, The Unofficial US Census by Tom Heymann, National Horseshoe Pitchers Association, NCHS, Bureau of Justice Statistics, USA Today, Time, The George Book of Political Lists compiled by Blake Eskin, The Courier-Journal, Calorie Expenditure Charts (Katch, Katch, MacArdle), National Guild of Hypnotists, Research Alert, The New York Times, The Naturist Society, kcomposite.com Reader Survey, National Opinion Research Center, 99 Little Known Facts About Elvis Presley, Jump, The Ultimate Elvis by Patricia Jobe Pierce, American Farmland Trust, American Association of Blood Banks, Economic Policy Institute, National Geographic Atlas of the World, Hellfire by Nick Tosches, E!, CBS News.)

FROM ISSUE #9

20,600,000 Americans play piano. As a result of their playing, 14,214,000 have sustained back injuries, while 7,828,000 pianists have sustained neck injuries.

The Space Shuttle orbits the earth at 25 times the speed of sound.

Each frame of a 70mm motion picture, when digitized for special effects or editing, consumes 10 to 20 megabytes of computer storage space. At 30 frames per second, the space needed to store a 90-minute feature film is the equivalent of 27,574 Zip disks.

23% of all Americans who die each year are cremated.

President and founding father, Thomas Jefferson filed for bankruptcy not just once, but several times, to eliminate the accumulation of his huge debt.

Elvis Presley's high school homeroom teacher Mildred Scrivener encouraged him to sing in her minstrel show. For his classmates at Humes High School in Memphis on April 9, 1953, he performed the song "Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me." His name was listed in the program as "Elvis Prestly." Three years later he was an international star.

In 1998, US doctors performed more than 47,000 cosmetic surgery procedures on teenagers.

More than 16% of Delaware's students are enrolled in private schools, a higher percentage than any other state. With less than 4% each, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Oklahoma have the least.

In 1998, over $77 million was stolen from US banks by more than 10,000 criminals. 169 of Nevada's 335 federally insured banks were a part of those robberies.

There are ten times more tornadoes per square mile in the United States than in any other country on the planet. 379 twisters hit America in 1998 alone, one of the highest annual tallies in history.

President Clinton and his family received 8.5 million pieces of mail in 1993.

Sixty-seven songs recorded by Elvis Presley before his death in 1977 had not been released by 1994.

K Composite founder Scott Ritcher appears for six seconds as a newspaper photographer in the 1999 film "The Insider" which stars Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, and was nominated for Best Picture. On the DVD version of the film, he can be seen in Chapter 24, Hour 2, Minute 13, from seconds 33 through 54.

The internet auction site eBay.com began as a bulletin board for collectors of Pez dispensers. Pierre Omidyar started the site in September 1995 because his wife wanted a way to interact with other Pez enthusiasts. Now, more than 400,000 new items are added to the site daily, from which eBay receives a minimum of 25¢ each.

On October 25, 1975, Evel Kneivel jumped his motorcycle over 14 Greyhound buses at King's Island, Ohio. The live broadcast was seen by 52% of TV viewing households, which still holds the record as the highest rated episode of ABC's Wide World of Sports.

(SOURCES: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Ziff-Davis Television, Cremation Association of America, Affordable Bankruptcy, American Music Conference, The New York Times, George, the National Geographic Society, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, US Department of Education, National Weather Service, The Ultimate Elvis, eBay, ABC Sports, Federal Bureau of Investigation: a.k.a. "FBI" maybe you've heard of it.)

FROM ISSUE #8

15% of Americans have a passport.

Every second, 5 people are born and 2 people die. The population of the world grows by an average of 3 people per second, about 250,000 people per day, or about 95 million people per year, or 1 billion people every 10.5 years. The more people there are, the faster it grows.

250,000 televisions are manufactured each day, the same number of children who are born each day.

US public school teachers spend an average of $500 of their own money every year on teaching materials.

Every second 7 new users connect to the internet. That's 4.2 million new users each week. 1 In 4 internet users are buying something online right now.

Jane Austen, author of "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice," wrote only six books, all of which were published anonymously.

The average bra gets 180 days of wear.

Elvis Presley's private telephone number in Memphis was 397-4427.

In 1830, Charles Babbage mapped out his concept for the computer, but the technical and mechanical materials to construct it were not available at the time. His design was finally executed over 100 years later.

1 out of every 10 children in the US public school system has been classified as mentally or physically disabled.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Four years later, there were over a quarter million telephones in operation.

Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the most famous composers of all time, died poor at age 36 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Ketchup travels out of a bottle at 26 miles per year.

In 1992, the Ford Motor Company spent about the same amount of money on health care as it did on steel.

40% of all American first graders report being in love.

In 1924, over half the cars in the world were Ford Model T's.

During Elvis Presley's career, his album liner notes credited playing piano on 14 songs. While he didn't write any of his own material, he co-wrote 7 songs, including "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel" and "Love Me Tender." He performed 38 songs during concerts of which no known recordings exist and no studio recordings were made.

Sterilization is the nation's most widespread method of birth control.

During the 1991 season, 8 of the NBA's 354 players were under 6 feet tall.

The average American walks 2.9 miles per day. Lawyers walk 0.9 miles per day, cops walk 6.8 miles, and mail carriers walk 4.4 miles.

38% of Americans are afraid of snakes. 24% are afraid of public speaking.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame has a total of 2,518 available star spaces, of which fewer than 500 remain undedicated.

9.7% of Americans are Pisces, more than any other sign.

(SOURCES: CNN, Maidenform, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, US Department of Education, A&E Biography, Harper's Index, Courier-Journal, Ford Motor Co., The Ultimate Elvis, The Unofficial US Census, Our Times: The Illustrated History of the Twentieth Century, Newsweek, RH Bruskin, American Journal of Health, American Podiatry Association, Dr. Scholl's.)

FROM ISSUE #7

The year of 1900 was a big year for sports. It's when baseball officially adopted the 5-sided home plate. It's when dribbling was introduced in basketball. And the 1900 Olympics in Paris included checkers and fishing. Really.

47% of American men enjoy sex more than money.

50% of all Kentucky brides in 1997 were teenagers.

55% of US college students are chicks, 45% are dudes.

During 1995 in New York City, 311 people reported being bitten by rats, while 1,519 people reported being bitten by other people.

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman now lives on the Baltic island of Faro where he views movies in his private theatre and writes.

On March 30, 1887, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the first kindergarten for the blind was incorporated.

50% of all magazines fail in the first two years. 95% of all magazines fail within five years.

The New Yorker magazine lost $1,000,000 each month during 1997.

In 1991, there were 139,500,00 cars in America. Of that number, 34.2 million cars were washed once a week, that's 24%. On the other hand, 5% of American cars (6.55 million) were never washed.

65% of dieters who set out to lose weight succeed.

The first Apple Macintosh computer, sold in 1984, was Y2K compliant.

More women in Congress went to Notre Dame than any other college.

Of college girls who read Glamour magazine, 51% report having known someone who was involved in a student-teacher affair.

The debut album by Louisiana-born 17-year-old Britney Spears has sold 16 million copies.

On December 31, 1956, Elvis Presley called Liberace on the telephone to discuss their mutual interests in pianos and Cadillac Eldorado's. Mr. Showmanship referred the King to George Barris of Kustom City Automobiles in Hollywood. Elvis later cried when he heard that a Chicago 14-year-old, Martin Ritchie, was electrocuted and died while hanging an effigy of Elvis to protest censorship.

The Apple iMac was the best selling computer in America in 1999.

Lisa Kudrow graduated from Vassar College in 1985.

Nearly two thousand applicants competed for 15 job openings in 1987 for the occupation of US Astronaut.

The first Father's Day and the first policewoman both happened in 1910.

(SOURCES: Our Times: the Illustrated History of the Twentieth Century, The Harper's Index Book, The New Book of Rock Lists, CNN, Maritz Marketing Research, Glamour, American Demographics, Project Vote Smart's Reporter's Resource Center, Billboard, Byte, The Ultimate Elvis.)

FROM ISSUE #3

$100,000,000.00

Once again this column appears as a little something to give you some perspective on how much money one hundred million dollars really is... and what it's used for by the people who have it. Whether it's Epic Records paying Michael Jackson to make a record, or Ross Perot buying campaign supplies, it's a lot of money.

Now, we find out that $100,000,000 can buy 8.3 miles of standard interstate highway. While this is a huge figure, it does not include the following "extras": lights, guardrails, exits, and bridges. All of those cost more. Most interstates being built now are more than 30 inches thick, and Americans pay more per mile to build roadways than anyone else in the world. We also enjoy the smoothest, best marked roads. And thanks to your neighbor's dad who got life in prison for strangling his wife, all the trash you throw out the windows will soon be picked up - providing us with the cleanest possible scenery along our proud journeys. Why is all this important to you? Because for every mile that's out there, you and everyone you know pitched in five cents each.

(SOURCES: The Courier-Journal, USDOT.)