Posted on by Patrick

Delicious Little Bits Of Knowledge

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.

Heroes … Davy Crockett, the man of the coonskin hat and frontier legend was not killed at the fight for the Alamo, rather he was captured after the battle and murdered. It was said about Davy that, “…He was so tough he could climb a thorn tree with a panther under each arm.”

Books … Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, in any language. The only published materials to outsell her books are the bible and works by Shakespeare,

Baseball … Major League pitchers are such sissies these days. In 1883, Timothy John Keefe pitched for the New York Metropolitans, he pitched sixty-eight complete games winning forty-one and threw 619 innings.

Disneyland … Walt Disney built Disneyland on Orange County earth that was essentially desolate. On the property was a Canary Island date palm planted in 1896 by an early rancher. Walt excavated it (15 tons worth) and moved it to what would become Adventureland. Today it is the oldest living thing in the park and stands near the Indiana Jones ride.

Civil War … General Ulysses S. Grant, while waiting for news of the Battle of the Wilderness smoked over twenty cigars. The Union troops that his rival Robert E. Lee would kill in that battle would be buried in Lee’s front yard as he owned and lived in what would become Arlington National Cemetary.

Football … In the early days of the NFL, a tackled ballcarrier could crawl forward until he was pinned and yelled “down!” … According to the FBI, one of the highest revenue sources for organized crime is wagering on NFL football – over $100 billion is wagered (illegally) annually.

Whales … When a blue whale lunges to eat it gulps a volume of water equal to one lane of an Olympic-sized swimming pool … Bowhead whales can live hundreds of years. One killed in 1995 was estimated to be 211 years old. Scientists believe it is possible that whales that were alive during the Lewis & Clark Expedition (1804-1806) are still alive.

Music … Stevie Ray Vaughan once opened for Huey Lewis & the News prompting a photographer to say: “Stevie opening for Huey Lewis is like Hendrix opening for the Monkees.”

WWII … Almost half of the Pearl Harbor casualties were on the USS Arizona; 1,177 of the 1,514 sailors assigned to the Arizona died the morning of December 7, 1941. Over 900 men – seventy-eight who had at least one brother on the ship – remain in the ship’s sunken hull.

Cigars … Captain Frank Lillyman of the 101st Airborne was the first man to jump from the first US plane over Normandie on D-Day. Hiding a training injury so that he could jump on D-Day, he jumped with an unlit cigar between his teeth. It turns out the US Army issued soldiers twelve cigars a week; Lillyman said he never made a jump without a cigar.

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.