Say, do you enjoy the statistical arcana? Sure you do! Who doesn't? So you're going to love the hell out of the 2003 Statistical Abstract of the United States, which among many other things (many, many, many other things) tells us that:
-- Retail sales of berry-growing supplies had an inexplicable spike to $227 million in 2001, then settled back to a more reasonable $171 million in 2002
-- Aluminum recovered from scrap was a muscular 6.27 billion pounds in 2002 (which is all the more impressive when you think about how light aluminum is)
-- Sales of archery equipment stayed flat in 2002, but sales of skiing equipment ticked up sharply
-- Tourist travel to the US more than doubled among Pakistanis in the '90s, but dropped among Finns
-- People who went to the movies in 2002 tended to be better educated than people who went to amusement parks (although you couldn't prove it by the chart-bendingly high cohort of mouth-breathing, joke-explaining, loud-talking dimwits who sat behind me in movies in 2002, and the statistically insignificant numbers of people I had to ask to stop talking while riding "Space Mountain")
All this and so much more -- so very, very, VERY much more -- is here, at the US Census Bureau. And tell 'em Blather sent you! (Via Poynter's Al Tompkins.)
This is the shizizzle.
Posted by: Ron | February 14, 2004 at 06:38 AM