Posted on by Patrick

Making A Buck

Fun Facts: American Business

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.
  • Daniel Boone sold deerskins called buckskins for varying amounts of English pounds and then American dollars. In America, the costs of these skins eventually were simply called a buck.
  • George Washington distilled Whiskey at Mount Vernon because he needed cash. In 1799 he distilled 11,000 gallons for a profit that would have been worth $142,000 in today’s dollars. He liked sweet wine, rum punch and whiskey.

see more facts

Posted on by Patrick

Sister Mary Joanna & The Invention Of The “Fun Fact”

Sister Mary Joanna was four feet nine. She was a Sister of Notre Dame. It would be many years before I understood that she had nothing to do with the Fighting Irish football team, the Four Horsemen or “Touchdown Jesus.” For that matter, it would take a long time for me to figure out why they called her “sister,” because I had four sisters at home and they weren’t even close to the same thing. She spoke broken English (it might have been broken Italian). She had a pretty impressive black mustache, only a day or two from the combing and trimming stage (for this we labeled her Mister Joanna, even though we knew that mocking God’s sister might trigger a natural disaster).

read more

Posted on by Patrick

Fur. Feathers. Fins.

Fun Facts: Animals

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.
  • Albatross spend 95% of their lives over open oceans; wandering albatross have the longest wingspan of all birds, 12 feet tip to tip; they can fly four million miles over a lifetime.
  • The sperm whale that attacked and sunk the whaling ship Essex in 1820 (the real world Moby Dick) was an 85 foot long male, weighing 80 tons with a 20 foot wide tail.
  • Penguins can cool their stomachs (using them like little refrigerators) to a temperature that slows digestion, they can therefore regurgitate and eat the same food over the course of days.

Read More Facts