Billions

My parents must have told me a million times not to exaggerate.

And pholks, I've tried hundreds of thousands of times not to do that.

I wasn't a math whiz but I know my numbers pretty well. But all this current talk about billions just bothers me to no end. Probably a hundred times a day, I spend a few spare seconds trying to comprehend just what our President, our Congress, our financial experts, major corporate banking and securities pholks and the millions of network financial gurus are doing. They throw the word billions around like confetti at a birthday party or beads at a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade.

My mind is geared to hundreds and thousands. I'm not wired for millions, let alone billions.

Google one billion and you find some interesting fact apparently gathered by pholks who either have nothing else to do or earn their keep researching such things. Best guess it is a combination of both. It sure saves a guy like me from doing the math longhand.

I think that during my life time, I've earned around a million bucks, give or take a couple hundred thousand. I have $107.56 to show for it, before current bills and taxes. But that's another story.

I know that a billion is a thousand million and is written as 1,000,000,000. According to my research, a British billion is 1,000,000,000,000. An American trillion is the same as an English billion and an English trillion is a million million million. Nothing I care to sweat about since I can't foresee any practical reason to check it out.

The only reason to discuss billions is to try and make sense, or semi-sense, about just how bad our economy is and how much bailout is being bailed.

As a news person, I feel it necessary to stay current with what is going on around this world of ours.

Here is part of what I've garnered recently regarding this billion thing.

Did you know that a billion minutes ago, Jesus was still walking on this earth?

A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

A billion months ago, dinosaurs walked the earth (one billion months is about 82 million years.)

Consider how a caveman would have been so overwhelmed in trying to even contemplate what a dozen was, let alone a hundred. Math problems certainly were very low on the list of things to do. Fire, the wheel, finding something to eat and how to keep warm and dry were priority concerns. There weren't numbers, let alone math. Obviously, it was so simple a cave man could do it.

Do you realize that a billion seconds ago it was 1973? Now that, pholks, I can remember pretty well, since that year I became 29 years old. Being the math whiz I am it is easy to figure out that I'm well past the two billion seconds mark on this earth.

Chances are I won't make the 3,000,000,000 mark, but I'll give it my best shot.

A couple other things to think about: A billion inches is 15,783 nukes or more than half-way around the earth. The earth is about 8,000 miles wide and the sun is roughly 800,000 miles wide, not quite a million.

Since this column probably took me about one hour to complete, I could crank out 114,000 of these things if I worked around the clock for 114,000 years. With between 30 and 35 years of columns written at various monthly schedules, I'm off to a decent start.

Miles can be reached at mshuper@valleyvoicenewspaper.com