FUN FACTS: Just Because

Life is mostly about the pursuit of knowledge and, therefore, the collection of fun facts. All my fun facts were harvested personally … They started as a physical book purchase from Amazon, then moved to a Kindle download where I bookmarked them by hand; at the conclusion of a book they were transcribed into a Snoopy Moleskine, and finally, they appear here for your personal wonderment.
  • Author James Michener wrote nearly fifty books, has over seventy-five million books in print and gave away over $100 million.
  • Martin Luther King Sr. was the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He changed his and his son’s name to Martin Luther after the theologian who was a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation … Both MLKs were named Michael at birth.

  • By 1952 Hank Williams had sold over ten million records in just a little more than five years.
  • Contrary to public perception, over the last twenty years, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has been cut in half.
  • The musical Oklahoma! won the Pulitzer Prize and ran on Broadway for 2,212 shows, about five years and nine weeks.
  • There were 371,683 German, 51,156 Italian and 5,413 Japanese POWs who were interned in the United States during World War II. They were generally put to work down on the farm, a lot of them picked cotton and many U.S. organizations fought sending them back once the war was over.
  • For a career Navy pilot (flying twenty years or more) there’s a twenty-three percent probability that he/she will die in an aircraft accident.
  • Richard Rodgers wrote over 900 songs and in one estimation he is the most played composer of any kind of music ever.
  • About two-thirds of the land in Utah is owned by the federal government, about the same as Alaska, a bigger portion than any state but Nevada.
  • As recently as 2014 a Nielsen SoundScan report indicated that American radio stations were still playing “Hotel California” once every eleven minutes.
  • The total employed by the Catholic church in the U.S. tops one million people. Worldwide, the Catholic-employed dwarfs other government and private sector employers. In 2014, one-sixth of the world’s population was baptized Catholic, 1,253,000,000 people.
  • The Beatles played their “rooftop” concert (on the roof of the Apple headquarters building which they owned) on January 30, 1969. They basically played and practiced five songs, “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909” and “Dig a Pony.” … During the concert, Paul played the same Hofner Violin Bass he played at their last concert, and he still had the setlist taped to his bass for that 1966 show at Candlestick Park.