The numbers are up:  We now have 50 million people in our country who are poor -- while online sales on Black Friday busted one billion bucks for the first time.

The increased stats on the poor stem from a new census measure that considers medical costs and work-related expenses. The new formula also means there are more people now living below the poverty line than in 2010 -- about 16% of the population.

Interestingly, online sales from November 1st this year are also up 16%  -- from the same period last year -- while the number of Americans visiting online shops this Black Friday was 57.3 million, an increase of 18%.  Cyber Monday sales were expected to push past 1.5 billion dollars.

Now, what do you suppose anyone will make of those two radically different sets of numbers, slammed together and asked to play nicely together?

The return to work -- Monday, after a long, holiday weekend:  This is such a grim, dour moment in life that there's only one known antidote.  And with that, we hereby Break Glass and Pull Switch In Case of Emergency -- and are rewarded with underpants news.

The good news:  There is actually some underwear news.  The not-so-good news:  There wasn't much.  News, that is -- although, now that you mention it, unmentionables are getting so tiny anymore that there's not much of them in that sense, either.

Well, to paraphrase a war criminal:  You go to work the Monday following a long holiday weekend with the underwear you have, not the underwear you wish you had.

Buck up, remain strong, everyone -- and we'll get through this return-to-employment crisis together, patriotically clad in 100% American underwear!

On that elastic note of a pep talk -- and before anyone gets his or her bloomers in a wad and flags us a penalty for delay in story -- a pair of Queen Victoria's linen bloomers were auctioned recently in the UK, bringing about $575, the BBC reports.  (It was just one item, yet they are called a pair -- perhaps because they are singular at the top, but plural at the bottom.)

The only problem with thinking critically, and having any hope, is that doing so within range of any other illogical humans instantly provides no shortage of subject matter able to receive profoundly heavy, unyielding criticism.

One supposes that the added problems of searing, splitting headaches and becoming radically entrenched in depression about the plight of the species are no picnics, either.

Unless one wins the lottery or is born a Dubya or Mitt, one must take the bad with the good in this life, we all learn quickly enough, and to greater and lesser degrees of satisfaction about this arbitrary arrangement of things.

We realize we've never been consulted for an opinion in the matter, yet are expected to live that reality all the way through -- knowing there are always more grindstones than we have noses in stock.

"This year I wasn't about to kill people."

That's a pretty good attitude to take in general.  It seems even more fitting when talking about a squabble over a Tinker Bell sofa with another Black Friday shopper, as Elizabeth Garcia had done, at a Toys-R-Us site in Times Square last year.

Even without the Body-and-Door-Crushing Super Savings Specials, and shoppers brandishing pistols and other weapons high overhead, trying to get other shoppers to back off from a prized shopping bargain, many people would call today Black Friday anyway.

And not just from the need to make funeral arrangements for a loved one who may have died at a shopping center for the shabby privilege of trying to save a few bucks.  And, not just from referencing other calamitous feeding-frenzy aftermaths, like the stock market crash of 1929.  Just from the sense one gets from the zombie-like compulsions to shop -- from the mindless, automatic need to consume, and from the senseless, bottomless greed grating and grinding along today.