Think your electric bill is high? This should make you feel better. (Some of this and a little of that.)

A Penn- 
sylvania woman got a $284- billion electric bill in the mail last January.
"We put up Christmas lights," she said, "and I wondered if  had put them up wrong." Well, I guess! But my-oh-my, what a show that must have been.

• In Tennessee you CAN now legally carry guns into the state legislature... BUT, you CAN NOT carry home-made signs! Legislators explained, "Hand-carried signs and signs on hand-sticks represent a serious safety hazard." Don't they know "sticks don't kill people, people kill people." Gun rights trump (natural pun) free speech, I guess.

 

• In 2013, following Barack Obama's second term victory, American gun companies produced almost 11 million firearms, 222 percent more than produced in the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The number of pointed sticks produced is not known.

•  The universe is expanding at a rate of about 72 kilometers per second... faster than the speed of light. So, that's forever, right?

• The first electronic calculator on sale in 1957 could add, subtract and multiply. It weighed 308 pounds and sold for $11,000 in today's equivalent. So the abacus wasn't that bad after all. It just didn't do billions and trillions well... but what was a billion or trillion in those days?

• An estimated 50,000 limbs were amputated during the Civil War. Amputation was better than killer gangrene infections despite the fact that 'biting a bullet' was the closest thing to anesthesia and sterilization was not even known except by "kooks with a crazy idea."

• An Illinois anti-gambling activist won $25,000 in a sweepstakes game. She quickly explained it was "God showing His grace on me" for her noble fight against gambling. Hmm, two-to-one God wins every time. 

• Over the last 50 years our prison population has increased 500 percent. We now have 2.2 million behind bars. The United States represents 4.4 percent of the world's population but houses 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Yippee! We're NUMBER ONE! We must be doing something right... or wrong.

• Our moon, being constantly bombarded by micrometeorites traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, is eroding at the alarming rate of 0.04 inches every million years. At this rate, we will have no songs like "Shine on Harvest Moon" or " By the Light of the Silvery Moon" or "Moon River" to sing to our sweethearts when we are a billion years old. Hope I don't live that long. 

• A doctor walks into the examining room and puts his hand on the patients' shoulder. "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. You're dying and you don't have much time left." "Oh no!" replies the patient. "How long do I have to live?" "Ten," the doctor says. "Ten what? Days? Weeks? Months?" The doctor calmly replies, "Nine... "