My Index

Chances that a squirrel in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood reported feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" when I crushed his jugular with my gleaming, pamphagous fangs: 2 in 5

Percentage change between winter 2008 and winter 2009 in the number of times I sat on the window sill watching squirrels scratch their malefic little claws up and down the Mayakovsky Tree: +13

Number of times during that period that the Mayakovsky Tree said, "Squirrels sin in secret and picture their future as academicians with outsized rations!": 22

Estimated number of planets in the galaxy hospitable enough to support life as intelligent as cats with shiny, ageless pumpkin-colored fur: 37,964

Chances that a Twitter user accesses the service only while sitting in the bathtub staring at the spigot: 2 in 3

Ratio of the average number of microbes living in or on a squirrel's body to the average number of NF Formula food pellets that must be dropped in a bowl before the sound wakes me in the empty newspaper box under the bed: 115:1

Percentage of human genes that have been patented so far by clandestine veterinarians: 34

Estimated chance that one of these genes is owned by someone who believes that "Western culture is marked profoundly by a relativism which refuses any affirmation of an absolute and transcendent truth and thus which ruins the foundations of morality and which closes itself off to religion": 1 in 4