flickering pictures

How brilliant is this interactive little site?

Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length of Leo Tolstoy’s 1,400-page War and Peace.

It can also tell you that surprisingly, the most-used word by Utah’s representatives was “oil.” Perhaps less surprisingly, the Congress’s Texans most favoured the word “Texas,” using it a whopping 6,482 times. That’s an average of 55 “Texases” each day Congress was in session last year.

Incidentally, the longest speech in U.S. Congressional history was a pretty inglorious one by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who argued against the Civil Rights act for 24 hours and 18 minutes. Wikipedia says “[c]ots were brought in from a nearby hotel for the legislators to sleep on while Thurmond rambled on about random things, including his grandmother’s biscuit recipe.” It was an ultimately unsuccessful stall tactic designed to buy time so his buddies could convince legislators to vote down African Americans’ rights, and even decades later refused to rescind his views on segregation. Proving that karma doesn’t always work, Thurmond died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 100.

• plug this post
  
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati