Eight nights of Hanukah. Vera Ward Hall tells us it’s the last month of the year. Counting the days ’til Christmas. Anyway you celebrate it, numbers matter during the holiday season. This afternoon’s O-Buts is going to be adding up a few less celebratory figures.
England might be moving toward Brexit, or their exit from from the common market in 2019, but in 2017, more Britons than average made their final exits. That’s the word from Funeral Service Times, quoting the Office of National Statistics. The numbers for the third quarter of 2017 show that 111,849 deaths were registered in England, making this year on track to record the highest death toll in the last five years.
Chicago is also putting up near-record numbers, but not ones that will get the city into any hall of fame. The home-town Chicago Tribune reports that, with three weeks left in the year, the Second City has notched 630 homicides. It’s only the third time this century Chicago has had more than 600 in a year, joining 2003 (601) and last year, which saw 749.
Finally, a church in Kansas City, Missouri has put up 136 white crosses in their church yard. That’s one for every homicide in the city so far this year, the Kansas City Star reports. Leon Berg, a member of the Community of Christ Church in the city’s Norton Heights area (and a name one wouldn’t usually associate with a church), came up with the idea. He heard Kansas City is having one of the most violent years on records (a sentence people from Chicago probably read and think, “136? We’d kill for a homicide rate of 136…”), and couldn’t decide up what to do, and thought, “just remember them.” The church is already behind, as one more homicide was added to the tally since the story was reported.
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