You never know what you’ll find on these pages.

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The Case of Jorge Mederios

A texting driver made a widower of Jorge Medeiros, and perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to say that it was the association of text—words—with death that pushed him in the direction of faith in numbers.

In any case, left with the care of his two elementary-school-aged children, Jorge’s indispensible aid became a book of random numbers, a souvenir from the middle of the last century that his wife had picked up at a yard sale as a curiosity.

He started out using it for household tasks: How long should he run the dryer for? Its serial number was 4214289, so he opened the book at random and ran his finger down the columns until he came to a number that began with 421. The next two digits were seven and six. Seventy-six minutes? Seventy-six seconds? Seven point six minutes? The dryer dial said “Max Dry” next to the 70, so he decided on seventy-six minutes. The clothes were very dry.

He used the number book to determine what temperature to set the oven to keep the pizza warm, how many rolls of wrapping paper to buy for the school’s fundraiser, and how much was an appropriate amount to spend when the kids were invited to birthday parties. The results were varyingly successful and disastrous: 512 (degrees Fahrenheit) resulted in thick black smoke, a visit from the fire department, and no pizza for dinner; 96 (rolls of wrapping paper) delighted the PTO at Linsey Elementary School.

He even used the book of random numbers for the kids’ bedtime stories, at first just reading off the numbers, only to be pressed by the boys to explain the what, who, where, when, and why. Four thousand fifteen whats? Grains of sand. Twenty who? Fishermen. Three hundred fifty where? Miles off the coast of New Bedford. Eighty-eight when? Years ago.

But why?

“Thirteen,” their father said, and then, by way of further explanation, “The twenty fishermen carried the 4,015 grains of sand divided between their—” (here he consulted the book) “—five boats to ward off the bad luck of the number thirteen, when they had to go out fishing on the thirteenth day of the month. It’s a bit of the shore with them in the boat, see? So they’ll never drown. They’ll always make it home.”

And so on.

This his sons have accepted as natural. Three months ago, for their father’s thirty-fifth birthday, they pooled their funds and bought him Pi to Five Million Places. He told me the gift brought tears to his eyes.

Since then, he’s abandoned his original book of random numbers and now relies entirely on pi for his number consultations, taking smaller or larger doses of it as needed, mining it from its never-ending, nonrepeating decimal tail.

“It’s a continuous stream, see? Go on, open to any page.” I opened to page 147 (of 588), and sure enough, nothing but row upon row of uninterrupted digits, zero through nine.

“Just like life . . . and irrational, too, just like life.”

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767179049460165346680498862723279178608578438382796797668145410
095388378636095068006422512520511739298489608412848862694560424
1965285022210661186306744278622039194945047123713786960956364371

The United States — the greatest free-enterprise country on the planet — has tried to get along on private health insurance plans for half a century after national plans became common in Canada and the nations of Western Europe. The results haven’t been so good. In fact, the US spends more on health per person than most industrially advanced nations, and generally gets poorer results. Here below is a table by the World Health Organization.  It lists nations according to the life expectancy of their citizens. Longest life expectancy at the top of the list, a shorter life as you go down the list. See if you can find the United States.

Rank	Country	Overall life expectancy at birth	Male life expectancy at birth	Female life expectancy at birth
1	Japan	82.70	79.45	85.82
2	Switzerland	82.59	80.30	84.69
3	San Marino	82.56	81.98	83.28
4	Italy	82.38	79.83	84.74
5	Singapore	82.35	80.12	84.58
6	Iceland	82.30	80.30	84.00
7	Andorra	82.22	79.03	85.36
8	Australia	82.16	79.99	84.33
9	Spain	82.10	79.00	85.15
10	Qatar	82.08	81.31	83.27
11	Israel	82.05	80.19	83.76
12	Monaco	81.89	78.57	85.09
13	France	81.77	78.46	84.95
14	Sweden	81.74	79.79	83.62
15	Canada	81.54	79.50	83.50
16	Luxembourg	81.52	79.06	83.77
17	Cyprus	81.48	79.39	83.68
18	Norway	81.40	79.27	83.45
19	New Zealand	81.30	79.42	83.09
20	Netherlands	81.20	79.18	83.06
21	Austria	81.10	78.39	83.65
22	Greece	80.94	78.27	83.64
23	Ireland	80.73	78.64	82.78
24	South Korea	80.72	77.35	83.86
25	Finland	80.71	77.59	83.78
26	Germany	80.66	78.29	82.99
27	United Kingdom	80.49	78.50	82.40
28	Belgium	80.40	77.79	82.92
29	Malta	80.38	78.78	81.98
30	Slovenia	80.12	76.60	83.42
31	Portugal	80.08	76.96	83.10
32	Kuwait	79.86	79.54	80.37
33	Denmark	79.46	77.38	81.50
34	Chile	79.28	76.17	82.34
35	Costa Rica	79.14	77.02	81.34
36	Bahrain	78.72	77.67	80.09
37	United States	78.57	76.12	80.93
38	China	75.56	74.05	77.17
39	Brazil	74.33	70.97	77.75
40	Russia	68.85	62.97	74.82
41	India	65.46	63.81	67.30

Yes, the United States is 37th in life expectancy among the nations of the world. The CIA ranks us 33rd in its list based on UN member states.

Another way of looking at the health of a country is to look at its infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate is calculated simply by figuring the average number of infant deaths in every one thousand live births. The United Nations Population Division lists the United States as 34th.

What is lost today stays lost.
One story after another floats down
the murky corridors of mind,
all the way back to zero.
Then along comes the eraser.

Names, dates, who came with us
and who stayed home because they had chores
or their mothers said no — it’s a lost world.
It eats lunch with the dinosaurs.

You say: I can’t believe you don’t remember.
The four of us in the back seat of the convertible,
your father putting the top down…
the roller coaster…the handsome sailor.

I  concentrate on the scene.
It’s as flat as a raft on a dead sea.
the sailor tries to climb aboard, but after
fifty years his arms are not so strong.

He slips back into the current and drifts away,
along with the convertible
and all the rickety cars on the Big Dipper,
slowly chugging their way to the top.

—Marilyn Robertson

And as long as were talking about pulp fiction we should mention The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society. Yes, it was news to us, too. Their web site says, “We’re a group of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and complete strangers, who love good books and sunny days and enjoying both as nearly in the altogether as the law allows. Happily, in New York City, the law allows toplessness by both men and women. So that’s the way we do our al fresco reading. If you’re in New York and the weather’s good, won’t you join us sometime…?”  The photo above comes from their website. Finish reading this page first, the whole page, then go off and do what you will. We hope that will include buying a book.

If you wish, the egg represents the stone that was rolled against the entrance to the tomb to seal it and was found rolled aside on the third day after his death. Or, if you wish, the egg being empty — and all those painted eggs are first punctured and drained — symbolizes the empty tomb of Christ on Easter day. But for many people, contemporary Easter eggs, as bright and colorful as flowers, simply call to mind springtime, fertility and that awakening we feel when we have come through another dark winter and are looking forward to more light and warmth.

Richard Perle

We’ve now come to the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq and it appears that the story of that event isn’t being clarified, but simply smoothed over. Yes, we must focus on the world today and look forward to what lies in the future. But unless we are clear minded about what happened in the past,  unless we understand what went wrong and why, we’ll be making the same errors again.

Despite the fantasies of  Vice President Dick Cheney, there was no connection between the terrorist attacks of September 11 and Saddam Hussein. And despite the repeated announcements by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, there was never any credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and planned to use them against the United States.

There was, of course, a lot of vague speculation and fanciful rumor about Saddam’s presumed biological and chemical weapons. And intelligence services of friendly nations with a common interest tend to reinforce each other. But intelligence estimates are only estimates; they are never absolute statements rendered with certainty. As a matter of fact, investigators sent into Iraq in the days just prior to the war found no such weapons, and objective reports from our own personnel found no reason to believe the weapons existed. That part of history seems to have been erased from the page.

Certain conservatives — such as Dick Cheney and Richard Perle —  had been looking at Iraq as an easy target even before the terrorist attacks on the United States. Indeed, it was an easy target. Our earlier war with Iraq under the first President Bush had reduced the Iraqi military machine to a hollow shell of its former self. The country was hemmed in with economic and military sanctions which we and others had imposed. And, of course, we had a no-fly zone over Iraq and were flying sorties over that country every day, never losing one of our aircraft, but destroying their countermeasures whenever we wished. The idea that Iraq was a threat to the United States is laughable, but it was part of Richard Pearle’s paranoid view of the world and his blinding fear for the state of Israel. It’s amazing how much has been forgotten in a decade.

Because it is the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, NPR’s Renee Montagne interviewed Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board and a leading advocate of invading Iraq. Perle, like the other neo-conservatives around President Bush, was wrong about the reasons to invade and the consequences which would follow. And like the other neo-conservative ideologues, he has learned nothing in ten years. He still thinks he was right and the rest of us were wrong. Here, from the NPR interview, is the last question and Perle’s astonishing answer.

MONTAGNE: Just one final question. There’s no question you were a great proponent of going into Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ten years later, nearly 5,000 Americans troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded; when you think about this, was it worth it?

PERLE: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that.

Oh, yes, we can. And we should say we shouldn’t have done that. Otherwise, people like Richard Perle will lead us into another tragic and worthless slaughter “in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation.”