Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for December 10, 2023

One time there were 19 holes. One time there were 2.09 billion gallons.

One time there were 1,201 statues altogether.

One time there were 10,001 births.

May the Lord be with you as He is with me.

Too bad the Otagi Nenbutsu-Ji Temple doesn’t have room for humans.

That’s a lot of water. I wonder if it would be feasible to use artificial turf on golf courses?

I think I’ll start a GoFundMe account to raise money for Ripley to buy a calculator. According to the Dept of Agriculture, an average farming field takes about 1.5 acre-feet of water. That’s the equivalent volume of 1.5 feet of water over a surface of one acre. Something above 300 thousand gallons. Let’s say 400. And let’s say a 400-acre golf course, kind of a heck of a golf course, bigger than half a square mile. It means 160,000 gallons of water for a golf course so big that doesn’t exist at a farming standard ratio, more demanding than just grass. And, here’s the catch, the ratio is per year!!

Ah, the first emojis.

i have a crossed beak too

What a waste of water.

The pooch’s potential in-laws – ‘So, tell us a little about your family’s background.’

Do the beaks on the crossbill alway cross the same way? Always the upper crossing to the left, as shown, or do some cross to the right, making some crossbills left beaked and others right beaked. Just curious.

If there were such things as a bird dentist, that Crossbill Bird would be diagnosed as having a severe overbite.

and they named the puppy Goth

They still can’t open macadamia nuts

A green-spotted Pyrenees? Really?

Wowsville on this Sunday panel of facts!!

Fortunately, the water evaporates and rains down again.

That’s over three thousand Olympic swimming pools, or 168 pools per each of the 18 holes. Or, more directly, if you’ve got an average-sized course of maybe 150 acres, that’s 6 million square feet, so 318 gallons PER SQUARE FOOT PER DAY. Or, in a different way, that’s a 42 foot depth of water over the entire course. Yes, I’m an engineer, why do you ask? :)

The 2.08 billion gallons figure is quoted at as the average daily use from 2003 to 2005 for all golf courses in the United States, not for a single course. The same source says that golf courses account for about 0.5% of water used for irrigation in the USA. The amount used by any particlar course varies according to local conditions. I am not a golfer, and not in the USA, so I have no axe to grind here.

Wait a minute! 2,080,000,000 gallons of water is 3,336,666,666 cubic feet. That’s 31,311 olympic size swimming pools. It’s also 17,326,400,000 pounds. That can not possibly be right!!

Don’t worry about the golf course—-Trump will pay for it