Posted on by Patrick

The Day That Will Live In Infamy

Fun Facts: Pearl Harbor & Hawaii

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.
  • Admiral James O. Richardson, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific fleet, told FDR in 1940 that moving the Pacific fleet to Hawaii would only tempt the Japanese to attack. He was fired for his advice in February 1941.
  • Bull Halsey (Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr.) who was immortalized by Robert Mitchum in the film Midway and by Paul and Linda McCartney in the song “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” said after Pearl Harbor, “When we get done with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell.”
  • A seaman on a destroyer after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was quoted as saying, “Hell, I didn’t even know they were sore at us.”
  • After Pearl Harbor, Churchill was pleased, knowing the U.S. would be forced to enter the war, “Hitler’s fate was sealed, Mussolini’s fate was sealed and as for Japan, they would be ground to powder.”
  • The USS Nevada, sunk at Pearl Harbor, went on to be part of the D-Day convoy.
  • Senator Arthur Vandenberg on December 8, 1941, “To the enemy we answer, you have unsheathed the sword, and by it you will die.”
  • Japan’s shipping losses in the first three years of the war surpassed its shipbuilding capacity by four million tons.
  • In 1940 Japan had a population of thirteen million, having tripled in less than a century, but they were materially bankrupt, importing everything including rice.
  • As early as 200 A.D. people paddled across the Pacific from Polynesia and founded the Hawaiian Islands, and they lived there undisturbed for the next 1,500 years.
  • In the 1700s, Hawaiians started surfing; the first boards were eighteen feet long and weighed 150 pounds.
  • When James Cook arrived in Hawaii in the 1700s, the population was about 300,000, in a short amount of time the white man’s disease would cut that population by seventy percent.
  • By 1884, one-quarter of Hawaii’s population was Japanese. The U.S. thought Japan would try to claim it, and that fact and the desire to trade with China led to Hawaii’s annexation in 1897.
Posted on by Patrick

Fun With U.S. Presidents*

Beginning with Abe Lincoln in 1860 and continuing through the late 1890s all U.S. presidents had facial hair, but since William Howard Taft in 1913, no president has had whiskers.

That’s gotta piss the hipsters off. Over 100 years and nary a soul patch. Not a handlebar, a Fu Manchu, a gnarly sideburn, not even a Van Dyke (a Van Dyke is any form of both a goatee and a mustache with the cheeks bare). That’s because a president can’t just roll out of bed and look the way he wants. He has to be coiffed and get bossed around by handlers who are seemingly in possession of some poll that says the old gals in Oshkosh find a 72-hour growth unpresidential. Facial hair, probably not important. But presidents are – important and fascinating and odd and unlikely and flawed and funny. Presidents are a hot topic in my insignificant little life.

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