I have so much free time now that I've decided to read the almanac. That's something I never had time for, and never wanted to do, and wasn't at all interested in. I still don't particularly want to do it, and it still doesn't interest me, but you know how rich people buy really tacky things because they want to show off how wealthy they are? Like, they've purchased all the nice things in the world, but have so much money left over that they decided to buy all the ugly things, too? That's what I'm doing with free time. I have so much that it's, like, my bling. It's the mirrorball Rolls Royce of free time. I'm The Sultan of Temporal Excess. In my world, there's twenty-five hours in a day, if you know what I mean.

My disinterest in almanacs is strange since, until a couple weeks ago, I didn't know what an almanac was. All I had to go on was that there was this book called The Farmer's Almanac (warning: that link will take you to a book you don't want), and, for some reason, it told you things like when the best time was in the previous year for harvesting pumpkin flowers, or during what phase of the moon your cows' udders would be close to bursting, rendering unto you white, liquid cash.

I looked at the book once. All I thought was, "This is of no use to me, for I have no cows."

Lucky for me, there's another kind of almanac. I found it when I was looking at the stupid one for farmers. It was called Schott's Almanac. I thought it would tell me things like what the best phase of the moon was for milking Schott, but that wasn't it at all.

The book is filled with lists and poll results and summaries of the previous year's doings, and they involve anything but the optimal season for gopher sexing (that's checking the gender of gophers - not the other meaning of the word).

I like almanacs now. The almanacs I like is Schott's Almanac. I'm halfway through it, and I still don't know what an almanac is, but I also don't know what vanilla pudding is, and I like that. I know that vanilla pudding is soft and tastes good, but what's it made out of? I don't know.

Nobody does.

The best almanac you will probably never read

Schott's Almanac checks the pulse of our times, and we see that the heart of the human spirit has gone tachycardic. After reading what I have - portents of the coming Darkness - I'm convinced that, if we don't do something soon, this heart of which I speak will go into arrest, and The Great Universal Overlord's Paddles of Most Defibrillation shall have to be applied to the patient before it is too late.

But is it already too late?

With his masterpiece, Ben Schott takes us down through history as if we were viewing the sights from a steep waterslide made of Teflon coated with butter.

You must be this [holds hand up] this tall to ride this almanac. Ha ha. Nobody ever makes jokes like that, with the thing where you're all, "You must be this tall to ride this [blah blah blah]..." That's all me. Anybody else you see doing it copied me.

Though it may be a telescope pointed at the wake of Spaceship Earth, Schott's Almanac provides no such magic with which to stare into the eye of the future. For that, we need a shaman - a seer - a diviner.

We need me. And, believe me, I would love to provide the service of reporting on what the future brings, but I went to a Halloween party last night where my finger was involved with a terrible accident involving one of those really dull pumpkin carving "knives" made for children. I nearly broke the skin. There is still some minor discoloration in the area.

Obviously, in this state, I can't very well toss the runes or interpret hamster birthmarks. Runes are heavy, and hamsters try to bite you if you use them for this purpose, as they are the Guardians of Time, and it is their job to stop anyone from looking through the peephole of distant events.

I do not wish to do further injury to my finger, though I swear on my Wicca altar that I will swim up the waterfall of the continued and uninterrupted sausage links of the unhappened, for that I may report to you what the winning lotto numbers will be several months from now.

It's always the lotto numbers people ask for first when they get wind of someone bending the rules of nature's clock. Not who's going to be the first woman on the moon, or whether we ever receive a radio transmission from a far off civilization somewhere else in the Milky Way. Nope. Lotto numbers and the Superbowl. Always. Or how long you can keep that stick of butter in the fridge before it finally goes bad.

The human imagination is an exotic thing, pregnant with the unexpected, always ready to surprise.

Oh, and they also want to know if dear old late Aunt Debbie is doing well in heaven, but I tell them - this is what I say - I tell them, "This is a skilled application of the sixth sense known as Cognition of Time Ahead; not an episode of Crossing Over with John Edward. This is a serious business. Get out of here. Go be with your beloved charlatan, John Edward. Be his patsy. Go."

As much, then, as I'd like to take you on a walkabout around the uncharted bush, I cannot. Instead, I'll rip a few stats from Schott's book that I thought were funny or scary, and I'll share them with you.

Perhaps you, too, will be motivated to learn about what happened last year after you've read this. Why you should bother to remember anything on your own when someone else is looking after that for you is a question with only one answer: "That's a good question."

Save your memory for things like remembering your car keys, or not forgetting to pick your child up from daycare for the 800th time.

Schott has everything else in order. It's like, if they made coupons for things like being able to do something with less effort, Schott's Almanac is a coupon that saves you a year's worth of research. You get to know the past in the amount of time it takes you to read it in its compressed, almanacic form.

It's genius.

To give you a taste of the fruit that falls from Schott's knowledge tree, I bring now a few statistics from the almanac. I have included at no extra cost my own very intelligent commentary to help you interpret the findings.

Polls abound in the almanac. Some are entertaining. Some are informative.

Some are terrifying.

Come.

Come and be affrighted with me. Together, we be affrightten...

--- 58% of American workers have purloined office supplies for personal use [Harris Interactive; May 06]

42% don't know what the word "purloined" means, so they just stole 'em.

--- 56% of Americans think we're ready to elect a female president [Diageo/Hotline; Feb. 06]

51% of the US population is female.

I'm not saying anything.

I'm just saying...

--- 51% of Americans think the death penalty is not imposed often enough [Gallup; May 06]

I'm not sure what this means. I was pulled over once by a cop who tried to bust me for some non-offense. I was traveling down the road in the left lane of a four lane highway. Nobody else was on it, really. The thing was all but empty. The cop's complaint, which I would understand on a crowded street, was that I was cruising in the passing lane. True, but I wasn't blocking anybody. Aside from the cop, there wasn't even anyone to block, and he went out of his way to maneuver over behind me and then ride my bumper for the next three miles as though this was a NASCAR race and he was drafting. I was driving a '70 Trans-Am that had so much torque you could still chirp the tires by flooring it at sixty. I should have taken off like The Bandit and tipped my ten-gallon hat in his direction, which would most definitely have been "back there somewhere." I swear, yo - that Trans-Am had so much get up and go that you'd think it had a Flux-Capacitor in the back. It's there one minute, and then it's gone. Whoosh.

There's a cliché: "I'm gonna rock you like a hurricane."

This is the car that rocks that hurricane like a hurricane.

It rocks the hurricane like a hurricane that describes the way someone's gonna rock you.

By the time this car's done rocking the hurricane like a hurricane,
there's nothing left with which to rock downstream. At that point,
all the person threatening you can say is: "I'm going to rock you like
a springtime breeze with hints of buttercup in the waftage." When
he's hit that stage of anemic intimidation, you can just playfully
slap him, and he'll drop like a dot-com stock on a Friday afternoon
in the middle of May, 2000.

Bad ass, people. B-A-D  A-S-S.

Like I said, Smokey pulled me over.

I asked why the camping-in-the-passing-lane law hadn't been, to the best of my knowledge, enforced in the past, and why it was suddenly so important that even someone who wasn't causing any trouble needed a talking to. In every state I've visited and in which I've driven, camping in the left lane on crowded highways has been a huge problem. These are the times when you get three cars driving abreast, doing precisely the same speed. Those are the people you need to pull over. But me? Driving down an empty road? WTF?

The cop told me that "the good chief of police, Charles Moose" had mandated a 30% increase in the awarding of traffic tickets. This news pissed me off, as it sounded rather arbitrary. Shouldn't there be a 30% increase in traffic violations first?

Similarly, how can you say that "the death penalty is not imposed often enough" without some kind of qualifier? Do they mean that the death penalty just plain isn't used as often as it could be? As it should be? As they'd like it to be? And isn't the subject deserving of a little more thought? I realize this is a shortcoming of the poll, but it's no less disturbing.

YEAH! MORE KILLING! BRING IT ON!

Ghastly.

--- 46% of Japanese consider sexual relationships to be tiresome [Japan Family Planning Association; June 06]

Well... yeah.

I've watched some anime, and I've flipped through some manga, and I think I'd get pretty tired of cleaning up all that urine, too.

--- 44% of Americans consider the federal income tax they pay to be about right [Gallup; Apr. 06]

Are you kidding?

It might be due to my status as a single guy with no dependents, but for the past few years, my tax liability has been nearly 50%. Part of that has been living in Oregon where state income tax is just about 11%, but I still wasn't especially happy about losing nearly 40% while living in Washington where there is no state income tax.

If I were getting health care and free ice-cream, I might feel better about it. Even if it's crappy socialized health care where you rot in the waiting room and bleed to death before you get to see a doctor, I'd still want it. It's like the free gym membership I got through Microsoft. I didn't use it, but I liked knowing it was there.

The ice-cream can be crappy, too. The generic orange/vanilla cups with the little wooden spoons where the spoons have been hanging out so long that the ice-cream tastes like little wooden spoons. Again, it's always there, and that's the comfort. It doesn't matter that it tastes like a tree factory.

As it is, though, I could have worked less, made less money, but lived at nearly the same comfort level thanks to a much smaller tax liability. For this reason, increasing my rates back when I was a contractor was something I really had to think about. A huge jump made sense, but going for another 10%, meaning that more would be expected of me by my clients, and also that the increase might push me into a higher tax bracket, was counter-productive.

I guess I'm part of the 56% of Americans who think it sucks.

--- 42% of Americans rate the overall state of moral values in the US as poor [Gallup; May 06]

I wonder how much overlap there is with the people who think we could do with more death penalty action.

I also wonder where someone gets off saying that other peoples' morals stink. Who's making the bloody rules here?

I'll obey the law (most of the time), but I'll probably disagree with you about things like porn, and that's none of your effing business. I think most people are morally uptight, but that doesn't mean I think they ought to sit in front of Debbie Does the North Pole with their eyes taped open.

If we aren't hurting each other, or anybody else, then let's all be left to our own sleazy indiscretions.

--- 40% of women would choose not to menstruate [Association of Reproductive Health Pros; May 06]

Typical bellyaching. If you women really cared, you wouldn't be so wishy-washy about.

"[Women] would choose not to menstruate" (emphasis added by the Rodawgg).

Take action, you layabouts! Choose to menstruate, or don't, but don't get all, "I would choose not to menstruate."

Saying that you would choose is like saying "I might make a decision about it."

Take control of your bodies. Do it now.

Just stop menstruating if that's what your heart tells you to do. The choice is yours.

Seriously.

Gawl.

You never hear guys complaining about stuff like this.

--- 34% of Americans think the US health care system requires complete rebuilding [CBS News/NYT; June '06]

Brilliant!

Everybody knows it's far cheaper to replace an entire car than to fix a wonky muffler. Well, 66% of people, anyway.

--- 25% of Americans think the US spends too little on the military [Gallup; Feb '06]

These people figure strongly into the 44% who are ecstatic about how much federal income tax they're paying.

--- 11% of Americans consider it acceptable to lie on a resume [AP/Ipsos; June '06]

The other 89% consider it necessary.

--- 10% of Americans ate less chicken and turkey because of bird flu [Fox News; Mar. 06]

And thanks to their brave sacrifice, 0% of Americans died, much less contracted, bird flu.

--- 5% of Americans consider polygamy to be morally acceptable [Gallup; May '06]

The male population of the remaining 95% think polygamy is highly morally unacceptable, but said they'd change their minds if they could get more chicks.

Don't even tell me stats aren't awesome. There's pages of this revealing freak show in the almanac.

Schott's Almanac.

The only almanac.