Cabinets, Pericles, trivia

Business percentages: In case you missed it, on a recent show Glenn Beck had a graph that illustrated the percentage of each past president's Cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the Cabinet. You know what the private business sector is: a real-life business, not a government job. Here are the percentages.

T. Roosevelt 38 percent

Taft 40 percent

Wilson 52 percent

Harding 49 percent

Coolidge 48 percent

Hoover 42 percent

F. Roosevelt 50 percent

Truman 50 percent

Eisenhower 57 percent

Kennedy 30 percent

Johnson 47 percent

Nixon 53 percent

Ford 42 percent

Carter 32 percent

Reagan 56 percent

G.H.W. Bush 51 percent

Clinton 39 percent

G.W. Bush 55 percent

And the winner is:

Obama 8 percent

That's right. Only 8 percent, the least by far of the last 19 presidents. And these people are trying to tell our big corporations how to run their business?

How can the president of a major nation and society talk about business when he's never worked for one?

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Pericles: During World War I, London's bus fleet sported posters designed to inspire the beleaguered British. One might assume the placards would have exhorted pedestrians with the ringing words of a legendary Englishman. Instead, they displayed excerpts of a funeral oration by Pericles, the leading citizen of fifth-century B.C. Athens.

"You must look every day upon the power of your city and become her lovers," he said. "And when you have understood her greatness consider that the men who achieved it were brave and honorable. ... Now it is for you to emulate them, knowing that happiness requires freedom and freedom requires courage -- do not shrink from the dangers of war."

Pericles delivered the speech during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens' nearly 30-year conflict with city-state Sparta.

French philosopher Francois Voltaire called the Athenian era one of four great artistic epochs along with Augustinian Rome, Renaissance Italy and France under Louis XIV.

More important, Athens was a democracy, one of only two democracies -- the U.S. being the other -- to last more than 200 years. And at its height, its helmsman was Pericles.

-- James Pethokoukis, Investor's Business Daily

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Some fun trivia: The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.

The words "racecar," "kayak" and "level" are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).

There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous and hazardous. (You're not possibly doubting this, are you?)

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious." (Yes, admit it, you are going to say, a-e-i-o-u.)

"Typewriter" is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. (All you typists are going to test this out.)

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

A snail can sleep for three years.

Almonds are a member of the peach family.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

If the population of China walked past you eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors.

Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

The average person's left hand does 56 percent of the typing.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.

There are more chickens than people in the world.

Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

Now you know more than you did before.

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.