If you did not know Pat, he was an amazing stand up; created (with CJ Sullivan and a few others) the Visitors Locker Room; wrote for blerds.com and was, beyond being a great friend, likely the funniest person I ever knew. He passed away two years ago in his sleep. Today (Friday) is his birthday.

If you have not previously seen/read/heard his material, you should check it out at patbrice.com. It is all, beyond funny.

I always recomend starting with “A Billion Pennies” (MP3 link), Pat’s story about interviewing with a stock exchange company. He was asked a surprise question (“how many pennies would fit into this room”); panicked; and answered, “a billion”.

The Billion Project

Several months after Pat passed away, I came across a website called “The Billion Project”, which tries to help people understand how big a BILLION is. According to this website, America is the only country in the world that uses the term “a billion”, rather than the phrase “one thousand million”. Consequently, we have an inferior grasp of the size of “a billion”, because we tend to just view it as the next sequence beyond a million.

Any way, I bring it up because…

How did the website attempt to teach us –once and for all– how big a BILLION is?- By showing how much space a billion pennies would take up:

Nine public school buses could not hold a BILLION pennies.

…When I found it, every one at work must have wondered why I was rolling on the floor, laughing at a website designed to teach you about huge numbers…

–Additional Notes–

The Billion Project website goes on to say:

“If you were to stack a billion pennies in a single pile, one atop the other, the stack would reach nearly one thousand miles high. For comparison, note that the Space Shuttle typically orbits only 225 miles above the Earth’s surface. “

… A claim that mirrors, almost exactly, Pat’s joke about magazines that explain large numbers by just listing their distance to the moon:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=13837636

…I’m not sure he knew it, but I think –or I’m starting to think– Pat was the best ‘large number’ comic of all time.

Reason #342, why I miss him (or, about a tennis ball worth of pennies, to put that number a different way).