You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

9,000 performances

Neil Simon, the Broadway playwright, died yesterday in Manhattan at the age of 91. His shows — which include “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” — were performed more than 9,000 times between 1965 and 1980, “a record not even remotely touched by any other playwright of the era.” The Times also reports that, in 1966, Simon had four Broadway shows running at once. [The New York Times]

$48.4 million car

A record was set for the most expensive car ever sold at auction: a red 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO for $48.4 million, sold by an early Microsoft employee. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. [Jalopnik]

51.53 inches of rain

Hurricane, and later Tropical Storm, Lane dropped 51.53 inches of rain as of yesterday morning on the Big Island of Hawaii. That’s the third-most rain dumped by a storm in the U.S. since 1950, following Hurricane Harvey last year and Hurricane Hiki, which also hit Hawaii, in 1950. [AP]

500-meter dragon boat race

A unified North and South Korean team has won a gold medal at an international multi-sport competition for the first time, at the Asian Games over the weekend. And the medal came in a pretty gosh darn cool sounding sport: 16-member dragon boat racing. A dragon boat, according to some exhaustive Wikipedia reading, is a wooden, human-powered boat, similar to a canoe, which originated in China, often decorated with dragon heads. China finished a close second in the race. [BBC]

2 Supreme Court appointments

The saga of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, complete with federal charges of fraud and witness tampering, continues. Gov. Jim Justice (heh) appointed two people to take seats on that bench until a November special election. Earlier this month, the state’s House of Delegates impeached the court’s four sitting justices, amid a scandal involving a “$32,000 dark blue suede sectional sofa.” [WVPB, The New York Times]

100 formal requests

According to a spreadsheet obtained by Axios, House Democrats have submitted more than 100 formal requests for hearings and documents, “spanning nearly every committee,” which are seen as a preview of the investigations the party would pursue should it retake the House in November’s midterms. They relate to the firing of James Comey, Jared Kushner’s ethics compliance, the travel ban, hurricane response in Puerto Rico, and many other things. [Axios]

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