As all of you should be aware, I am a lover of history. Not just that run-of-the-mill American history that everybody knows about and has read about in textbooks. I like quirky, odd, and obscure stories of American history. Here are a few samples of some historical notes about the United States that the majority of you never heard of.
The United States has profited greatly twice at the hands of a nation that viewed Great Britain as their enemy. In 1803, France, aware it could not hang on to the vast Louisiana Territory, sold it to the United States for 2 1/2 cents per acre rather than have it fall into Great Britain’s hands. In 1867, Russia sold the 586,400 square miles of Alaska to the United States for less than two cents an acre. The logical purchaser would have been Great Britain, whose minions in Canada bordered the land on the East, but Russia considered Great Britain to be an enemy (Britain had won the Crimean War against the Russians and sided with the Confederacy in the United States Civil War).
The Pony Express, which has lived in legend for more than a century, lived in fact for less than two years. Indian raids curtailed service on the 1966-mile route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. The transcontinental telegraph finally replaced it in late 1861.
In 1813, Major George Armistead, command of Fort McHenry, placed an order for a flag “so large that the British would have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance.” In fulfilling the commission for that flag, subsequently celebrated as “Old Glory” and “The Star-spangled Banner,” Mary Pickersgill and members of her family sewed over 400 yards of bunting into a banner 30′ x 42′, costing $405.90. This was the flag that Francis Scott Key saw that “was still there.” It hangs today in the Smithsonian Institution.
The American Colonization Society was formed, in 1816, by the Rev. Robert Finley of New Jersey, for the purpose of establishing an Africa colony to which the 200,000 U.S. blacks freed by slaveholders or born to free parents could be sent. Prominent slaveholders like Calhoun, Clay, Randolph, and Jackson supported the Society because they feared the threat to slavery posed by free blacks. Congress was persuaded to lend aid for land purchases. In all, about 15,000 blacks left America for the colony, which came to be called Liberia. The capital is named Monrovia, for President James Monroe.
The first nation to receive foreign aid from the United States was Venezuela. In 1812, Venezuela, fighting for its independence from Spain, suffered a severe and damaging earthquake. Congress appropriated $50,000 to help the victims.
Eskimos use refrigerators to keep food from freezing.
I wish I could live seventy-five more years and then be able to read a blog similar to this explaining to the citizens of that time how weird, stupid and crazy we were. It would probably be worth a million laughs to those future citizens. The Clinton years alone could supply enough weirdness laughter and gagging for many blog postings.
How old are you? It’s a valid question that most people ask about a stranger when discussing them with a third-party, “He’s about 20 years old.”. People who are in their 20’s think people in their 30’s are old while people in their 30’s think people in their 50’s are old. It’s all relative and silly but we do it all the time without really thinking about it. In my case I think anyone younger than 60 is just a stupid kid and that should show you how really stupid it is to judge a person by their age. Today’s post is going to list some interesting accomplishments by the age of the person doing them. Using age as way to judge someone is just ridiculous as these examples will show you.
At the Age of 1
Mary, of the House of Stewart, became Queen of Scotland.
Brooke Shields was selected as the Ivory Snow baby.
At the Age of 2
Judy Garland launches her stage career.
Isabella II ascends to the Spanish throne.
At the Age of 3
Albert Einstein speaks for the first time.
Alice Liddell first meets Charles Dodgson (pen name of Lewis Carol) who later used her as inspiration to write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
At the Age of 4
Malcolm Little (who later changed his name to Malcolm X) watches as his family’s home was burned to the ground by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bob Hope emigrates from England to the United States
At the Age of 5
Devora Wilson, Mountain climber, scales a 4000-foot peak.
Christopher Robin Milne hears the first “Winnie the Pooh” story, with himself as the main character, made up by his father, A. A.
At the Age of 6
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gives keyboard concerts across Europe.
Shirley Temple receives an honorary Oscar for her contribution to film.
Ron Howard stars as Opie in TV’s, The Andy Griffith Show.
At the Age of 7
Helen Keller, blind and deaf, master’s a vocabulary of 625 words.
Carol Brown, who travels more than an hour daily to attend a distantschool because as a black she is denied admission to the local all-white school, motivates her father to file a lawsuit, resulting in the landmark Brown V. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which finds public-schoolsegregation to be unconstitutional.
😉😉😉
My Credentials
Age 1 – Flung my full diaper at my mother.
Age 2 – Spoke my first word (Shit!)
Age 3 – Drew my first tree.
Age 4 – Threw up on my sister.
Age 5 – Drank my first drink of alcohol (bottle of perfume)
Age 6 – Ran away from school (police found me later)
If you’ve read this blog at all you know I consistently use famous quotations from famous people to help make a point. Over the years having all of those quotes available has made my life much easier. Not all quotes are complementary, and I found almost as many nasty and mean quotes as good ones. Here are some quotes that some people probably wish they hadn’t made. You be the judge…
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” Bill Vaughn
“You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete the monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gates of Hell: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” George Bernard Shaw
“St. Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.” Coco Chanel
“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of the birds? People love the night, a flower, everything which surrounds them without trying to understand. But painting – that they must understand.” Pablo Picasso
“There are moments when art attains almost the dignity of manual labor.” Oscar Wilde
This next section concerns a prolific contributor to every subject imaginable: Anonymous. I truly enjoy these mean and nasty unidentified criticizers.
“Critics are the stupid who discuss the wise.”
“An architect is two percent gentleman and ninety-eight percent renegade car salesman.”
“The Eiffel Tower in Paris is the Empire State Building after taxes.”
“A modern artist is one who throws paint on a canvas, wipes it off with a cloth, and sells the cloth.”
“They couldn’t find the artist, so they hung the picture.”
“Poetry is living proof that rhyme doesn’t pay.”
“Dancing is the perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”
After writing this blog for so many years, I tend to write and read everything six times trying to correct my many mistakes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the norm for other people to edit themselves, even those who are magazine and newspaper editors. It’s commonplace in everyday advertisements to see misspelled words, bad grammar and a general lack of concern for accuracy. It appears that our education system may be partially responsible for some of these issues, and it drives me effing crazy. Here are a few examples of “malaprops” collected from grade school, high school, and college examination papers. What do you think?
The American colonists won their Revolutionary War and no longer had to pay for taxis.
The air is thin high up in the sky, down here, it’s fat.
The flood damage was so bad they had to evaporate the city.
A horse divided against itself cannot stand.
The U.S. Constitution was adopted to secure domestic hostility.
Columbus discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
Brigham Young led the Morons to Utah.
Socrates died from taking a poison called wedlock.
The police surrounded the building and threw an accordion around the block.
To prevent head colds, use an agonizer to spray medicine into your nose.
Here’s one of my favorites:
Achilles’ mother dipped him in the River Stinks until he became immoral.
I’m about to do something I promised myself I wouldn’t ever do. Today I’m going to post three truly lewd and disgusting limericks. This is to appease a small number of readers who’ve been begging and bugging me for months to print some filth. It’s not something I want to do but I will do it albeit with a slight twist. As you read these three limericks you may notice a large number of asterisks. It’s part of the twist for you to determine the missing letters. That’s the best I can do for all you pervs out there, so enjoy.
It’s a cold and miserable day here in New England and my motivations have evaporated. I’ve been surfing the web for an hour, and something occurred to me. Regardless of how well you explain something, you’re wrong. There are just so many freaking so-called experts on every topic, who knew? That last statement was as sarcastic as I can make it without losing my mind. Never let it be said that Americans don’t have a high opinion of themselves as well as an innate ability to criticize new ideas at every turn. Social media is fine but it’s a double-edged sword. You can get your ideas out there whether they are well thought out or just plain stupid and then the backlash comes. I never really understood just how stupid I was until all of these so-called experts came out of the woodwork to explain things to me. I ‘ve always felt in my heart that many of our fellow citizens are idiots filled with misinformation and conspiracy theories but thanks to social media they now have the freedom to send their bullshit to the world and to further verify what idiots they are.
It’s nothing new because know-it-all’s have always been in the background spewing their thoughts and nonsense to the world. Here are a few samples from our illustrious past.
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” – from workers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to hire on his project to drill for oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859
“The concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a “C”, the idea must be feasible.” – stated a professor of Management at Yale University, commenting on the term paper by Fred Smith which earned only a “C”. The paper outlined a plan for a reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to create the Federal Express company in 1973.
“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” – an unidentified response to Debbi Field’s plan to start Mrs. Field’s Cookies.
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that say you can’t do this.” – a statement from Spencer Silver on the work that led to the adhesives for the 3M Post-It notepads.
“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?” – a statement from Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Ford Motor Company
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – a statement made by Charles H. Duell, commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
I love finding odd facts. Her are a collection of fifteen interesting and somewhat puzzling tidbits.
60% of sports related injuries occur during practice.
Golf may be considered a benign sport, but can carry a risk of injury and death, most often from lightning, power lines, heart attack, and heatstroke.
Experts estimate that more than 21 billion diapers are dumped into US landfills each year.
Adolf Hitler suffered from chronic flatulence.
Omorashi is a fetish subculture in Japan dedicated to arousal from the feeling of having a full bladder.
The average human will spend three years on the toilet during his lifetime.
The most germ laden place on the toilet isn’t the seat or even the bowl: it’s the handle.
Feces in the water supply causes 10% of the world’s communicable diseases.
Women are up to five times more likely than men to have urinary incontinence problems, primarily due to the trauma the body experiences during pregnancy and childbirth.
More Americans choke on toothpicks than any other object. Toothpicks injure approximately 9000 people every year.
Thanks to the technology like TV screens in grocery stores and airports, cell phone videos, and digital movie libraries, the average American sees 61 minutes of ads and promotions each day.
A bezoar is a ball of swallowed fiber or hair that gathers in the stomach and get stuck in the intestines.
Ancient Romans used human urine as an ingredient in their toothpaste.
A mummified hand has been on display in City Hall in Munster, Germany for 400 years. It belonged to a notary who falsely certified a document, and had his hand chopped off as punishment, then displayed as a warning.
The world’s oceans contain enough salt to cover every continent to a depth of approximately 500 feet.
Now that the NFL season has come to a close for me, I can mourn for a few months until the baseball season starts. Then I’ll have yet another team that will tease me and disappoint me like they’ve done for 20 years and offering nothing in return. After the letdown of the Steeler loss, I decided that posting today would be a real crap shoot. Since I’m something of a science nerd, let me lay some interesting facts out for you that you may have not heard of before. No more sports postings for the foreseeable future. Let’s get started…
7% of licensed drivers in the United States are 16 and 17-year-olds, and they are responsible for 30% of all automobiles fatalities.
The driest place on Earth is Calama, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Not a drop of rain has ever been seen there.
Using cesium atoms, the clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in 300 years.
The lowest point that a person can get on this planet, unless he/she descends in a submarine, is where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea – 1298 below sea level.
In terms of the resources he will use in his lifetime and the pollution he will cause; one citizen of the United States is the equivalent of approximately 80 citizens of India.
Modern archaeologists have not yet agreed on how large a crowd the Coliseum in Rome could hold in its glory days. One authority estimates 50,000, but about 45,000 is the generally accepted figure.
An acre of typical farm soil (to a depth of 6 inches) has a ton of fungi, several tons of bacteria, 200 pounds of protozoa (one celled animals) and 100 pounds of yeast.
To provide a modern person with all of life’s necessities and luxuries, at least 20 tons of raw materials must be dug from the earth each year.
There are 2,500,000 rivets in the Eiffel Tower.
The English astronomer Edmund Halley prepared the first detailed mortality tables, in 1693. Life-and-death could then be studied statistically, and the life insurance business was born.
Well, it’s Sunday and the Steeler game has been canceled until Monday due to weather concerns. It’s a little annoying but not all that surprising for anyone who’s ever been in Buffalo during the winter. In my previous life as a regional manager for a national chain I was assigned stores in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. I swear to God that every time I made a trip there during the winter, I ended up getting snowed in and spending an extra day or two in order to give the citizens time to clean up the snow, open the roads, and allow me to fly the hell out of there. Buffalo is a nice town (sarcasm) but not a place I’d like to spend any extra time in. I’ve been to Niagara Falls and unfortunately if you’ve seen one waterfall you’ve seen them all. With that being said and since my day has been interrupted, I thought I’d get a little silly. Everyone seems to love the limericks I post so I offer you a few odd ball limericks today. These are tongue twister limericks written by a gentleman named Lou Brooks in 2009 in a book of the same name. Enjoy . . .
❄️❄️❄️
Nosy Rose got closed in a closet of clothes,
The clothes closet closed on Rose’s red rosy nose,
She tweaked on her beak,
For over a week,
Rose’s nosy red nose now hangs close to her toes.
🌨️🌨️🌨️
Walt walked and talked on his wife’s walkie-talkie,
Walt’s wife’s walkie-talkie made Walt’s talky-talk squawky.
Wide awake while Walt walked,
Was what Walt was while he talked,
While Walt’s wife walked her way to Milwaukee.
Two of these should be sufficient. Trying to get a computer program to type these as I speak is ridiculous. Here’s a description of my day in a nutshell.
As I worked my way slowly through the public school system back in the 1960’s I received little or no information or exposure to poetry. It was mentioned in passing in some classes but there never was any serious time devoted to it. It just seems to me that making some poetry (not just the classics) available to younger students might just motivate them to either read more poetry or to write their own. A gentlemen named Richard Lewis, a lecturer on children’s literature and creative writing, apparently agreed with me. In cooperation with UNESCO, he traveled through eighteen English speaking countries around the world collecting poetry written by children between the ages of five and thirteen. Three thousand poems were collected with the best 200 published in his book, “Miracles” published in 1966. I’ve picked out two samples to give you some idea of just how talented many of the youngsters can be when expressing their thoughts in a poetic fashion.
THUNDER
by Glenys Van Every, Age 9, Australia
I hear
the drummers
strike
the sky.
***
SUMMER
by Margaret Bendig, Age 10, United States
Inviting, rippling waters
Waiting for little toes
Hurry, go get changed!
***
After reading a few pages of these poems I had a minor epiphany. These children were not trained in poetry but as they wrote their poems many of them began to look very much like free-verse haiku’s. Having no set restrictions on the length of lines and syllable counting allows the young poets freedom to truly express themselves.
Of course, being the irreverent SOB that I am I decided to write this haiku of mine and take it down a road not normally traveled. It contains some reference to nature but also just a touch of my humor. It’s a poetic mortal sin to write them this way and I’m sure it will tweak the noses of a few people. It’s always fun at times to make some people a little crazy.
everyuselessthing.com 