Monthly Archives: February 2011

The “Are You American” Quiz

“Congratulations, you have won Jeopardy!   Did I mention that when I was in my 40s, I married a 27 year old woman?”

~Alex Trebek


As fine purveyors of all things American, sometimes it is necessary for America Fun Fact of the Day writers to take a step back and think about what America means to them.  Yes, it is a country, a way of life, and the creator of all things awesome.  This we know.  We know that we are Americans, either by blood or by love, and our fervor for this hunk of a continent knows no equal.

But every once and a while, a non-American tries to infiltrate our ranks.  Yes, Ivan Drago might stroll in, Carl Weathers in tow, and start to beat him mercilessly in front of us while saying, “If you do not hire me….he dies.”  And as he tells us about the time where robbers broke into his house, tied up his wife, and then left without taking anything just because they saw a picture of him in the house and realized, “Holy shit, Ivan Drago’s going to kill us when he finds out,” we might fool ourselves into thinking, “Yes, maybe he is American.”  But then, we remember Rocky beating the shit out of him to win the Cold War, and the fact that the name “Dolph” is a pretty shitty name.  And since you are able to read “Dolph Lundgren has a shitty name, fuck you Dolph Lundgren” without his hand punching through your computer and breaking your nose, that means that he is clearly not American enough.  And we were right to not hire him for that reason, and we totally sent Mrs. Weathers a really nice bouquet of flowers for the funeral.

Since other people can mask their accents, or not be named “Dolph,” we sometimes have to take the psychological route to determine who among us are truly American.  It is for that reason that you, dear readers, will be able to take our handy “Are You American” quiz.  It’s full of questions meant to separate the Patriots from the Portuguese, the Americans from the Albanians, and the Freedoms from the….French.

All french people are mimes.  True story.

So please take our test below.  For each multiple choice question, A is worth 0 points, B is worth 1 point, C is worth 3 points, and D is worth 5 points.  So add up your score, and check our scoring guide at the bottom of the page.  Good luck trying to pass this test, comrade.

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Vegan Restaurants: Why Do They Hate America? An Undercover Exposé

“No, anything but this assignment.  ANYTHING BUT THIS ASSIGNMENT!”

~REDACTED

As journalists, we take our duty to the public very seriously.  This nation has over 300 million residents, and not all of them understand the American nature of chugging a beer after dropping a hot dog into it (we call it dog bombing, and it requires a relaxed esophagus and a particular blindness to shame.)  So sometimes, we have to rub elbows with those that operate outside our rules.  Those that shun hot dogs, hamburgers, steak even.  To really get inside the heads of those that spurn these things that are so inherently American, we needed to do a little investigative journalism.  Much like Nellie Bly risked torture to uncover the evils of the mental health system in the 1800’s, Gunter Wallraff spent two years to uncover the human rights violation against immigrants in Germany, and Larry David smuggled himself onto the set of Hannah Montana to discover Billy Ray Cyrus’ evil sex dungeon, our investigators were required to go above and beyond the call of duty.

That’s right.  We sent someone into the Dragon’s Lair.  We sent someone…to a vegan restaurant.

Truly…the thing of our nightmares

And now, for the shocking truth behind a restaurant that dares not to serve meat…eggs…or cheese, here is the report from our Undercover reporter, whose name has been redacted so that his family would not leave him upon discovering he had consumed food that never took advantage of an animal at any point in it’s preparation.  Here is his shocking tale.

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Glorious Homeless Americans

“Gahhh habal heaeg gwaaarrrrk!”

~That Smelly Guy on the Bus


Every nation has its levels of despondency, where the rich and the poor are separated by a nearly impossible chasm of social status.  Some are fortunate enough to have riches beyond our wildest hopes and dreams, while others are forced to live on the streets, trying to find or get enough money to scrape by.  In nations such as Italy, the homeless bow down in silent penance, hoping for a kind stranger to hear their wordless plea.

But fuck that noise, America does it right.  That’s right, America is home to the craziest sons of bitches you’ve ever seen homeless.  There is a rich history of American crazy homeless people, the best of whom have quirky names and known habits.  The University of Illinois, for example, has a homeless character named The Rebel.  Northwestern has an overweight homeless person named “Big” who the rest of the homeless population despises.  And of course, there is shoeshine Lenny, who rides on a bike to inform you that he is shoeshine Lenny, and he doesn’t have any, but if you help him out, someday, we’ll all have plenty.

These people breath a special brand of crazy that only America can breed, and today, America Fun Fact of the Day salutes them.

At ease, hobo.

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John Wayne’s Pretty Darn American, Pard’ner

“Well listen here, pardner, she was just a stripper, she had no family, she can just disappear…”

~John “Marion” Wayne

In the classic song, “A Boy Named Sue,” Johnny Cash tells the story about a boy who had been given the unfortunate first name of “Sue” by a deadbeat father who he had never met.  Throughout the course of this epic piece of American music, Cash describes how the boy named Sue was forced to fight his way through school, due to the ridicule he received for his name, until he grew up to be a hardened man who could take on anyone.  Little did Johnny Cash know, but he was actually describing the story of another famous American who was born with a girl’s name.

That man would be Marion Mitchell Morrison, a.k.a. John Wayne.

This is the look of a man who has had sex with women he shares the same name with

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Michael Malloy, Super-Hobo

“Why won’t he die?  WHY WON’T HE DIE!?”

~The Murder Trust, 1933

It’s a shocking truth that, some great Americans?  Were not born in America.  Hell, Bob Hope, the man who made it a life passion to entertain American troops, was born in England.  We’re not elitists, we’re Americans, and we recognize that this is a melting pot, and that if you truly embrace what it means to be an American, it doesn’t matter where you were born.  Such is the case of the most glorious homeless man in the history of America, Michael Malloy.

Who was Michael Malloy, you may ask?  Only an Irish-American who was as impossible to kill as Rasputin, if Rasputin knew how to hold his liquor.  Born in Ireland, Malloy once worked as a Fireman before coming to America and inventing crippling alcoholism.  He died in 1933 at the age of 60, after a series of failed murder attempts at the hands of The Murder Trust.  While the death of a great, booze guzzling hero is always a tragedy, if you’re gonna go down, you might as well go down at the hands of a group as awesomely named as “The Murder Trust.”  The only way Michael Malloy’s obituary could have read any more awesome is if his cause of death had been listed as “advanced age and sexual encounters with twelve women in one night.”

Especially if he was dressed as a Stormtrooper, but ESPECIALLY if he was dressed as a Stormtrooper.

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Wherein AFFotD Decries the Slanderous Insinuations of American Prominence Perpetrated by the Fiendish Fortune Magazine: A Rebuttal of Fortune Magazine’s 100 Great Things About America List

“Are you shitting me, Fortune Magazine?  Hey, guys, from now on we’re using this fucking list as toilet paper.”

~Johnny Roosevelt, Editor-in-Chief of AFFotD

Believe it or not, despite the existence of the America Fun Fact of the Day, there are other publications that make it a hobby to try to tell us, Americans, what constitutes being American.  Now, we have to ask you, do High School Basketball coaches go to Michael Jordan to give him pointers?  Fuck no, Jordan would use his cigar to scald their retinas.  Does the editor of a grade school newspaper tell Ernest Hemingway how to write?  The one time that happened, the kid went missing and was never seen again.  But yet, we have assholes like Fortune fucking magazine trying to post a “Independence Day 2010” article about “The Top 100 Great Things About America.”  They’d be better off getting a slug to write an exposé about taking a salt bath.  Our researchers stumbled across this little gem and immediately were stricken with a hate boner.  It’s like rigor mortis for when you see dreams die.  This article so offends us we can’t even think coherently!   Fuuuuuuuuuck!

THIS is the LEAD PHOTO for the whole damn article.  A clown desecrating the American flag by blowing out of a FUCKING VUVUZELA!  THAT GET SHIT OUT OF OUR HOUSE!

So let’s look at the highlights of their “list.”  And may God have mercy on their souls.

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John F. Kennedy: America’s Most Fertile President?

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask…hey, who’s the blonde?”

~John F. Kennedy

It is a sad but simple truth that not all of our American heroes live a full life.  Some are fixed in the cosmos, shining beacons of glory, while others pass through like a shooting star, all-too-brief, but spectacular for its short time among us.  And sometimes, a shooting star will see another shooting star and bone it.

John F. Kennedy was one of those sex craved  shooting stars.

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Billy Angry, Dome-Maker

“Fuck nature.  Fuck winter.”

~Billy Angry

[Editor’s note: We wrote this article back in 2011 as a satirical discussion of an honest to God proposal to defeat winter by putting a dome over a town. You can see the name of the person responsible in the link to a Time Magazine article listed in the following paragraph. In 2013, the person this article is about reached out, claiming, correctly, that he did not do most of the things listed in this article. We responded with laughter, because, of course. In 2019, he reached out to us through his attorney to demand his name be stricken from this article. We complied. Though, again, you can just look at the Time Magazine article if you want to know his name. We have changed it here to “Billy Angry” because we’re not known for our subtlety here]

As we suffer through yet another brutal winter, some AFFotD staff members were ripping up old magazines to celebrate February 11th, which is our annual “everyone make fun of a dying media” day.  But while we were ripping up a Time magazine, a story caught our eye.  A story about reckless abandon, brazen defiance of “facts,” and a healthy hatred of nature.  It was there that we read the story of Billy Angry.

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A Detailed Examination of the History and Condiments of Hot Dogs

“Hoootttt…..Dooooooggggggsssssss….*drops a snowglobe*”

~Orson Wells’ last words

Americans truly are champions of unhealthy food, as we’ve documented time and time again.  With each American cuisine comes another foolproof method for us to gain incredible weight without having to suffer through eating anything that is not amazingly delicious.  Steaks, hamburgers, fried food and beer, all of these have been hoisted by the America Fun Fact of the Day staff as symbols of our greatness.  We are a land of temptation, and as the antagonist-character-who-is-a-thinly-veiled-metaphor-for-the-Devil-in-a-Christian-“movie”-made-by-a-Megachurch would tell us, “Sin is in”.

But one American food stands head and shoulders above all else, something that is delicious, high in fat, calories, sodium, nitrates, and suicide bomber white blood cells.  A food that, eaten alone, is already terribly unhealthy for you, but is expected to be combined with deep fried starches.  A food that should be filling, but where eating two, or even three, over the course of a baseball game is no big deal.  A food so American that every year we have competitions to see who can cram the most down our throat, and when a Japanese person dared to claim the world record, an American trained himself, Rocky style, to kick his ass by setting new world records each year.

We are of course talking about the reason why American health care is so expensive, the Hot Dog.

Just because it’s phallic does not make us gay to want to have sex with this right now.

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Ernest Hemingway Punches With His Writing Hand

“For me, bullfighting is much like driving.  I’m much better at it when I’ve been drinking.”

~Ernest Hemingway

American writers are a difficult group to pin down.  They can be champions of American virtues, the AFFotD-approved freelancers who punch bears and write sonnets, or they can be Dan Brown.  For every Mark Twain, there’s a Stephenie Meyer (who AFFotD staffers had to look up the name of several times by googling “that chick who wrote those shitty vampire books.”)  But when discussing American authors who were American, the entire AFFotD staff agreed that if there is a gold standard for American badass writers, the list would have to start with one Ernest Miller Hemingway, a writer so righteously American that, when we accidentally started to spell his name with two M’s instead of one, the ghost of his beard apparated and kicked Chuck Palahniuk so hard in the genitals that his balls penned a short story deriding materialism in society.

That’s right, Hemingway’s beard’s ghost is American enough to indirectly pen a short story good enough to get published in the New Yorker.  Not that we can say we were surprised.   Come on.  Look at that thing.

And with that look, seven French women just became impregnated.

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