PERSONAL TRIVIA: First bit of personal trivia – in my opinion, Celestial Season’s African Mango Orange Rooibos Tea tastes like a balsam Christmas tree! My family always had a balsam tree for Christmas when I was a kid, and this tea (oddly enough) tastes something like that good old balsam smell (back in the days when the trees were fresh and sappy, and you didn’t need to buy aerosol Christmas tree smell). I don’t decorate my apartment for Christmas these days, but I did make myself a cup of this tea yesterday morning. It was my cup of kindness, for auld lang syne. Call me sentimental, if you must . . . .

Second bit of personal trivia: I never really liked Mickey Mouse or any Walt Disney cartoons. I didn’t dig the TV shows or movies either (from way back in the 1960s, when I was a kid). Disney cartoons were quite well-made, but there was something too . . . . just too suburban about them. Sort of like Wonder Bread and almost any product sold by Kraft Foods (think of Miracle Whip, which was made for Wonder Bread). I liked Warner Brothers ‘toons a lot better; the characters on Bugs Bunny had more of an attitude. Mickey Mouse and his friends were just too . . . excuse the expression . . . “Mickey Mouse”.

Third bit of personal trivia: I didn’t like the old Dead End Kids shows on TV (and some movies) when I was a kid. But I thought that the Bowery Boys were great. The Bowery Boys were the final evolution of the East Side Kids and Dead End Kids movies that were started in the 1930s and ended in the early 1950s. The Bowery Boys were young adults, not juvenile semi-delinquents, as in the earlier incarnations. They were down-and-out adults, which just added to the charm. They hung out in Louie’s Sweet Shop, located deep in some New York City neighborhood (perhaps the Bowery?), and didn’t really do much of anything until something came along that got their attention (like a damsel in distress, of some sort). I tried to buy a DVD boxed set for the Bowery Boys (as a gift for a relative), but it doesn’t exist! Only the earlier “East Side Kids” incarnation is available. That’s a shame. The Boys deserve better.

And finally …. some personal trivia about the nation as a whole, when the lights go out. Recently, the US Center for Disease Control released the results of a 2002 survey regarding the sexual behavior of people aged 18 to 44. It turns out that for both men and women, 90% consider themselves straight — just plain straight. On the other end of the spectrum, 2.8% of men consider themselves definitely gay; for women, the corresponding number is lower, 1.3%. If you lump those who answered “definitely homosexual” together with the “definitely bisexual” crowd, it totals to about 4.1% for both men and women (which corresponds with past estimates showing that roughly 1 in 25 people are gay in some way). Interestingly, a somewhat greater percentage of women are bisexual than men (2.8% versus 1.8%).

What about the rest? About 1.8% of both men and women didn’t answer at all, and 3.9% of men / 3.8% of women answered “something else”. So, for both men and women, around 5 and ½ % didn’t want to call themselves hetero, gay or bi. Wonder what that means? Is voluntary chastity more popular than we think? If so, is it a permanent life-choice, or just burn-out from a string of broken relationships? And what if you included older people – what would be the percentage for “too tired to bother anymore”? Let’s hope that someone follows up on that, although I’m not sure if the federal government is the right organization.