Organically-Uncovered Fun Facts

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.

Getting Philosophical … People say smart, clever things (well, I mean, I don’t, but …) and some people write them down, catalog them or make note of them so they can put them to good use later or, more likely, forget about them entirely like you do your computer passwords. Here are a few: “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded” (Buddha said that) … “Argue as if you’re right but listen as if you’re wrong” … “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”

Military Leaders … Here’s something you should probably write down and keep in a safe place, the actual/given/formal name of Cap’n Crunch is Horacio Magellen Crunch.

Being Presidental … Dig this, a guy named William Rufus King was vice president under Franklin Pierce, but for only forty-five days, most of which he spent dying of tuberculosis in Cuba … Ol’ Abe Lincoln wore size fourteen shoes (had to special-order them on Amazon and pay extra shipping) … George Washington’s childhood home was a place called Ferry Farm in Virginia. If you use that exact spot as a compass point and draw a sixty-mile radius around it, you will find that within that circle George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe were born, grew into manhood and made their homes – gee whiz, right? … The British destroyed the Congressional Library during the War of 1812, so in 1914 Thomas Jefferson turned his pine bookcases into pine crates and shipped off his 6,500-book collection to Washington to become the new Congressional Library. It’s nice to have friends that read.

Parks & Trees … There are sixty-two National Parks, still, almost half of the states don’t have one … A tree named Hyperion in Redwood National Forest is the tallest of the world’s three trillion trees standing 379 feet … Trees with names make me happy, and here’s another, somewhere in the White Mountains is Methuselah, the world’s oldest tree – almost 500 years old … The so-called Discovery Tree, a Sequoia, was stumbled upon in 1850 and, of course, the first idea was to chop it down. It took five men twenty-two days and its stump was used as a dance floor for weddings and cotillions.

Fightin’ Words … J. Adams Puffer, the Benjamin Spock of the early 1990s (you remember Spock, he was the famous pediatrician who wrote books on child-rearing) said, “To stay morally and mentally fit, male children should fight once a day on average and more often during their first week at a new school.”

Slow & Fast … Tom Brady ran a 5.3-second forty-yard dash at the 2000 NFL scouting combine. Between 2000 and 2018, 308 college quarterbacks were similarly timed and 305 of them ran faster than Brady … In a game versus Pitt (at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh) on October 21, 1911, Jim Thorpe returned his own punt for a touchdown. Yep, Jim got off a spiral that went super high and at least forty yards downfield. All the Pitt players were busy blocking Jim’s teammates so he sprinted right down the middle of the field untouched; he got to the ball first, stiff-armed the defenders out of the way and rambled about twenty yards for a TD (the rules at the time allowed players on either side to recover and advance a punt).

Fun With Food … Mr. Potato Head was originally (around 1949) called “Funny-Face Man.” It sold for ninety-eight cents and had thirty pieces BUT you had to provide your own potato … the packaging said, “Any fruit or vegetable makes a funny-face man.” I don’t find playing with your food funny in the least, but apparently, a lot of poor people did. It was the first toy to ever be advertised on television.

It’s Not Trivial To Me … Should you find yourself maybe carried away in the pursuit of fun facts here are some reassuring words, validating that the life-long gathering of such fun facts is a noble pursuit indeed. These points were taken from Brainiac, a swell book authored by Jeopardy! whiz Ken Jennings. “Trivia is the bait on the fishing pole of education” … “There is a difference between the flower of trivia and the weed of minutiae” … “Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing, but they live in the same neighborhood.”