In China you can send money to your dead relatives. “Hell banknotes” are burned in a traditional ceremony, after which dead ancestors can use them to bribe the king of hell for a shorter stay.
They’re starting to use credit cards.
Society
United Nations
Excerpts from 112 Gripes About the French, a handbook produced to help American soldiers understand the French after the Liberation:
- The French are too damned independent. The French are independent. They are proud. They are individualists. So are we. That’s one reason there is friction between us.
- I never heard people gab so much. Gab, gab, gab. If you understood the language it might be interesting and not just “gab.” An American writer, Ambrose Bierce, said, “A bore is a person who talks — when you want him to listen.”
- The French are not as clean as the Germans. Perhaps not. If the Germans had had no soap for five years they wouldn’t be as clean as they might like to be. A learned man once said, “An untidy friend is better than an immaculate enemy.”
- The French can’t drive a car. They can’t keep it up. They ruin vehicles. The French, on the whole, certainly do not drive as well, keep a car up as well, or protect their vehicles as well as we do. Neither do women, compared to men. We have had more mechanical training, more technical experience. And at the present time we have incomparably better maintenance facilities.
The Sentinelese
The Stone Age isn’t quite over — not everywhere. On North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal lives a tribe of about 250 people, the Sentinelese, who have remained so hostile to contact with outsiders that their society is almost entirely free of modern influences.
They have no agriculture, subsisting through hunting, fishing and gathering plants. It’s not even clear whether they can produce fire without an external source like lightning.
The Indian government has made overtures by leaving gifts, but the warlike Sentinelese drove them off. Earlier this year, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who came too close to the island. Their bodies still haven’t been recovered — even a helicopter sent to retrieve them was driven off by arrows.
Subtract Line 55 From Line 45
Judge Learned Hand on the U.S. income tax code, writing in the Yale Law Journal, December 1947:
In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax … merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception — couched in abstract terms that offer [me] no handle to seize hold of [and that] leave in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness.
Even Albert Einstein, who died trying to find a generalized theory of gravitation, wrote, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
Guaranteed Turnout
Countries with compulsory voting:
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Fiji, Greece, Honduras, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mexico, Nauru, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela
New Year Be Damned
Jonathan Swift’s “Resolutions — When I Come to Be Old”:
- Not to Marry a young Woman.
- Keep young Company unless they reely desire it.
- Be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
- Scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
- Be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
- Tell the same Story over and over to the same People.
- Be covetous.
- Neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
- Be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes, and Weeknesses.
- Be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling Servants, or others.
- Be too free of advise nor trouble any but those that desire it.
- Desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly.
- Talk much, nor of my self.
- Boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
- Hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman.
- Be positive or opiniative.
- Sett up for observing all these Rules, for fear I should observe none.
The Sky Falls Again
Remember the Y2K crisis? We thought society was going to collapse because we hadn’t trained our computers for the future.
Well, it’s going to happen again. We’re going to run out of Social Security numbers.
Your number is unique; it’s not recycled when you die. About a billion numbers are possible, but we’ve been assigning them since 1936 and we’ve already used up about a third of the possibilities. According to some estimates we could run out by 2075.
What happens then? Who knows? But if our government collapses, head to South Korea: Their social security numbers give access to online video games.
Proof of the Pudding
No functioning democracy has ever suffered a famine.
Anonymous Identities
“John Doe” in other countries:
- Australia: Fred Nurk
- Austria: Hans Meier
- Belgium: Jan Janssen
- Colombia: Fulano de Tal
- Croatia: Ivan Horvat
- Czech Republic: Josef Novák
- Estonia: Jaan Tamm
- France: Jean Dupont
- Guatemala: Juan Perez
- Italy: Mario Rossi
- Lithuania: Vardenis Pavardenis
- Malta: Joe Borg
- New Zealand: Joe Bloggs
- Philippines: Juan dela Cruz
- Poland: Jan Kowalski
- Romania: Ion Popescu
- Slovenia: Janez Novak
- South Africa: Koos van der Merwe
In the United States, John Doe is always the defendant. An anonymous plaintiff is Richard Roe.
Snap, Crackle, Pop
The sound of Rice Krispies in other languages:
- Finnish: “Riks! Raks! Poks!”
- French: “Cric! Crac! Croc!”
- German: “Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!”
- Swedish: “Piff! Paff! Puff!”
- Spanish: “Pim! Pum! Pam!”
In 2002, pollster Kellyanne Conway found that most Americans could name the three elves but could not name any three of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices.