Pecking Order

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By Salient | 26 Mar, 2007

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Number of years New Zealand’s second oldest sporting competition, the Joynt Scroll, has been going for : 104

Year in which it was last won by Victoria University : 2006
Chance, according to student president Geoff Hayward, of winning it in 2007 : 100
Average amount of minutes a Kiwi spends watching TV, daily : 119
Average number of extra calories children consume for every hour of television they watch : 167
Average estimated salary, in today’s dollars, of the dads on the ten top-rated TV shows of the 1950s : $109,894
Average for the dads on today’s ten top-rated shows : $295,405
Average hourly wage for a Kiwi in the public and private sector (respectively) : $26.40, $19.07
Ratio of the typical salary of a paid gladiator in ancient Rome to the salary of a doctor or lawyer : 10:1
Increase in the cost to fill a Toyota Corolla with unleaded petrol today compared with 2002 : $25
Amount for which George W. Bush successfully sued Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 1999 : $3,567
Portion of the world’s motor vehicles that are in China : 1/17
Portion of the world’s annual traffic fatalities that are : 1/5
Number of players that Brazilian soccer teams have sold to teams overseas since 1993 : 6700
Amount the Brazilian teams have earned from these sales : $1,310,982,555
Year in which a French judge was caught masturbating in court : 2003
Minimum amount that an Arkansas mayor has discounted a prostitute’s city water bill since 2004 in exchange for sex : $112,743
Average annual number of male clients served in America in 1999 by each female prostitute : 694
Number of words in the first sentence of a Washington Post article on the recent Ruapehu eruption that refer to the Lord of the Rings : 5
Minimum number of garden gnomes relocated to the forest since 1996 by France’s Garden Gnome Liberation Front : 6,000
Number of toilet seats at the EU Parliament building in Brussels that a TV station had tested for cocaine : 46
Number that tested positive : 41

E-mail Pecking Orders to editor@salient.org.nz

SOURCES: 1, 2 Press Release: Victoria University of Wellington August 29 2006 3 Salient research 4, 8, 10 The Dominion Post, Oct 21 2006 5 Jean Wiecha, Harvard Prevention Research Center (Boston) 6, 7 Salary.com (Needham, Mass.) 9 Robert Sandy, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis/Mark S. Rosentraub, Cleveland State University 11 Enterprise Rent-A-Car (St. Louis) 12 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (Geneva) 13 World Health Organization (Geneva) 14 Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (Rio de Janeiro) 15 Revista Superinteressante (Sâo Paulo)/Harper’s Magazine 16 Ananova 17 Scott County Prosecutor’s Office (Waldron, Ark.) 18 Prof. Devon Brewer, University of Washington (Seattle) 19 Washington Post, March 19 2007 20 Le Front de Libération des Nains de Jardin (Villemoutiers, France) 21, 22 Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research (Nuremberg)

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