10 on Choice

by Leigh Simpson and Jeremy Topping and Leah Baltus
  1. Paper or plastic? The average American uses between 600 and 1,200 grocery bags per year. Only 1 percent of them use their own reusable bags. Ireland’s plastic bag consumption has dropped 90 percent since the country’s 2002 “plastax” on shoppers requesting bags at the grocery store.
  2. The elite Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has 6,000 members, all by invitation. Responsible for selecting Oscar nominees and winners, Academy members have never honored Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese with a golden statuette.
  3. Recently, Americans seem to have a nasty habit of electing the deceased to office. In 2000, they elected Mel Carnahan to the U.S. Senate. Since then, three dead candidates have been voted into the U.S. House of Representatives, most recently Patsy Mink of Hawaii in 2002.
  4. Among the Hollywood Ten who refused to name names when subpoenaed by McCarthy’s House of Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, only one went on to “cooperate” with the committee after being blacklisted and serving time in prison: Edward Dmytryk. Dalton Trumbo, meanwhile, helped end the blacklist by winning an Oscar for 1957’s The Brave One, which he’d written under a pseudonym.
  5. Though bards have been tailoring stories to suit their audiences for centuries, Edward Packard and Raymond Montgomery published the first of 184 Choose Your Own Adventure stories. In 1997, John Updike collaboratively wrote an online novel with 44 daily writers as part of a contest sponsored by Amazon.com—then a little-known online bookstore.
  6. As if The Swan weren’t alarming enough: According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2003 Americans had 254,140 boob jobs; 2,891,390 Botox injections; 356,554 rhinoplasties; and a total of 8,793,943 cosmetic procedures—an 18 percent overall increase in from 2002.
  7. When states began choosing sides for the Civil War in 1861, Kentucky, key to controlling the Mississippi River, declared itself neutral. Nonetheless, the Confederates took control of Columbus, Ky., on Sept. 4 that year, violating the state’s position. Kentucky subsequently declared itself in favor of the Union, although the Union army had planned to occupy the city the very next day.
  8. According to a recent Time magazine poll, 10 million Americans consider themselves vegetarians and an additional 20 million have flirted with vegetarianism sometime in their past. As of 2000, 45 percent of Americans had tried tofu and 27 percent reported eating soy products at least once a week.
  9. In 2003 South Carolina anti-abortion legislators called for a 6-foot statue of a fetus to be erected on the capitol grounds to “memorialize unborn children who have given their lives because of legal abortion.” The bill didn’t pass, so they put up a swing set instead.
  10. In 1995 the Dalai Lama named a 6-year-old successor to the 10th Panchen Lama, the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. The Chinese government did not endorse the 6-year-old but instead imprisoned him and named their own Panchen Lama reincarnate, Gyaltsen Norbu. The 6-year-old, Gendhun Choekyi Nyima, has not been seen since.

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