15 Cents a Day

NPR is in its pledge drive, which makes it hard to listen to. I try keeping the dial tuned to their station anyway, figuring it is the least I owe them (beats writing a check), but some days it is harder than others.

Like today, when the female beggar -- uh, I mean fund raiser-- suggested a donation level of $15 a month, and her chipper male partner pointed out that the amount worked out to "about fifteen cents a day!"

With the voices of math teachers Tolomay and O'Leary screaming in my head, I changed channels to a less literate but hopefully more numerically sound station.

So that’s how I ended up on the talc music channel. (Think about it, wait, wait – there it is. What, you expected a better pun from me?)

I was not assailed with politician math there, but their sense of history baffled me.

The announcers were giving clues about a musician, offering the listener a chance to guess the artist. Since one of the clues was an event that helped create “one of the greatest musical careers of the century,” I was thinking in terms of Bono, or Sting, or some other contemporary one word moniker.

It was somebody I never heard of, which didn’t surprise me as much as learning that the performer’s first song aired in 2002.

If my math is less fuzzy than the fun-drivers, that makes his “greatest career of the century” only four years long.

Which I suppose qualifies on a technicality with a century only six years in existence. But still, it feels like politician math to me.

Just my thoughts,

Sean