If I were to drill a hole straight through the Earth, I would come out at a point in the Indian Ocean that is approximately 1600 miles due west of Perth, Australia.

If I were to drill said hole straight through the northern hemisphere, I would come out at a point in China that is approximately 1300 miles east of Lahore, Istanbul.


In July of 2008 there were approximately 82 people per square mile in the United States. Compare that to 116 people per square mile in the world or some 40,000 people per square mile in Monaco or 4.6 people per square mile in Mongolia.

At the same time, there were approximately 8 square acres per person in the United States.

There is about one dog for every four people in the United States. The same goes for cats but no one really knows how many dogs and cats there are since we only track the animals that are registered through the counties. Our county doesn't require any registration so my nine pets are not counted.

I tried to look up horses but there seems to be some huge discrepancies between how many are in this country. In 1915, there were approximately 20 million horses in the US. The USDA said there were 5.3 million ten years ago but, to show only one discrepancy, seven counties in Maryland reported 81,000 horses while the USDA said there were only 45,000 in the whole state. So this piece of trivia is about the inadequacies of the USDA.


There are 2 other people in this country with my first and last names together. There are 102 people with my husband's name and there are 80 people with my birth name. Adding in the middle name significantly lowers the occurence rate.

The most common surnames (last names) in the US are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones and Brown - in that order. 500,000 people separate the two leaders and the difference between Smith and Brown is about one million.

On a list of the 1000 most common surnames in the US, the last five are Cooke, Velasquez, Whitley, Noel and Vang - in that order.

The most common first name for a man in the US is James, followed by John, Robert, Michael and William. The most common name for a woman is Mary, followed by Patricia, Linda, Barbara and Elizabeth. There are over twice as many Marys as there are Patricias.

There are 40,421 people in the US named Mary Smith and 50,993 named James Smith. Good for hiding but bad for finding. There are 171 people named Elizabeth Vang and 449 named William Vang.


There are approximately 8000 venomous snakebites in the US each year with 5-10 deaths resulting.

Auto accidents are overwhelmingly the number one cause of accidental death in the US with about 43,000 fatalities per year.


[The facts in this article were gathered in 2008 and are probably seriously out of date.]

The End