Hey, today's Columbus Day in the States. That's cool. I'm going to go with the whole "Indigenous Peoples Day" though, myself. Sorry Chris.

Right now I'm finishing up a good book about North America's native peoples. It's not quite as good as this other one I read two years ago, though. I think every American should read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

Here are a few fun facts from the book:

Conventional wisdom used to say there were fewer than a million people living in the Americas prior to "discovery" by Columbus.

This book says nuh-uh. At least twenty to forty million, possibly up to 200 million.

At the time Europe had around eighty to one hundred million people.

The capital of the Aztec empire was a city of a quarter million people - bigger than any of the cities in Spain, in fact.

The biggest city north of the Rio Grande was Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, which had up to 100,000 people in 1000 AD. (The same time as the Battle of Hastings for you European History buffs).

How big is 100,000 people? Berkeley, Calif; Burbank, Calif; Clearwater, Florida; Costa Mesa, Calif; Erie, Pennsylvania; Gary, Indiana; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Lafayette, Louisiana; Lowell, Mass; South Bend, Indiana.

So Cahokia would have been big enough to have a university like Notre Dame, the University of Louisiana or UC Berkeley, or the corporate headquarters for Disney, Warner Brothers, NBC/Universal, or a professional football team like the Green Bay Packers (go Bears!), or even, yes, the worldwide spiritual headquarters of the Church of Scientology.

Yep, it always comes back to good ol' Scientology. Hail Xenu, and Happy Columbus Day.