Static has a determined friend who has walked or jogged the streets of east Fort Worth, come rain or shine, almost every morning for the last 20 years. Walking Man makes mental notes on the curious and often disgusting objects his fellow humans discard on the streets -- spent condoms, loaded diapers, used syringes, discarded cartridges, brightly colored underpants, porn. You name it, he's stepped around it. Walking Man believes the world is composed of two types of people -- those who will stoop to pick up a found coin and those who won't.

For the last decade, Walking Man and his mate, Walking Woman, have been collecting the coins they've found on their jaunts and counting them up at year's end, their own measure of the economy's performance. Lean years, they figure, generate more people willing to stoop to retrieve a few cents. And fat times result in increased carelessness with pocket change that finds its way to the concrete. This year's tabulation has just been completed, and the news, Static has learned, is the worst ever: a meager $4.11 in found money for the year, barely a penny a day. The previous low was $5.86 in 1994. And the high for the last decade was high-rollin' 1996, when $14.89 was found. The news gets even worse: For the first two weeks of 2004, only a single cent has been found. With the Dow comfortably resting above 10,000 these days, Static isn't sure whether Walking Man's finds are anything but coincidences. But just in case he's on to something, Static's gonna start stooping.

And Static is damn sure getting rid of every almanac in the office. As the miserable year for found money drew to a close, the Associated Press distributed a news story that Static would have bet Walking Man's $4.11 was bogus. But no, the feds apparently were as serious as suicide bombers about this. "The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning," the wire service matter-of-factly reported. "In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists might use almanacs 'to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning'." Next year, Static expects a similarly solemn warning about people in possession of the yellow pages, which could, you see, be used in locating supplies for terrorist acts.