Category Archives: America Fun Fact of the Day

The Informative American Presents: What Scares Us? A Terrifying Look at America’s Fears (Originally Published April, 1950)

Posted on October 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Oh God, it’s a man with an unkept beard!  Kill it!”

~Average 1950’s professional


America puts on a pretty brave face, but if you think about it there are a lot of things that scare us.  China, the national debt, the fact that China has us on the hook for a terrifying amount of the aforementioned national debt, all of these things keep the President awake at night (but not for long, because the presidential silk pajamas are so comfortable).

But that’s just what 2011 America worries about.  Sometimes we like to sit back and wonder, how would America in 1950 react to the terrifying truths of the world changing around it?  Well, that seems as good of a time as any to dig into our stacks of The Informative American and see what our AFFotD predecessor was terrified of back in the 1950’s, and sure enough, it was a tried and true mix of understandable and terrible.  So without further ado.

The Informative American Presents:  What Scares Us?  A Terrifying Look at America’s Fears (Originally Published April, 1950)

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Zombies in America

Posted on October 10, 2011 | 1 comment

“AGHHHHH!  OH MY GOD WHY!?  IT’S EATING ME!!!!!  AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

~Gandhi

While Paganism is responsible for most ills in America (Hippies, The popularity of the Twilight films), it did bring us one great thing.  Halloween.  All’s Hallowed Eve.  For 20-somethings, it’s the closest we can get to Caligula levels of debauchery without having to get a lethal weapons permit.  As this glorious day filled with alcohol and costumes of questionable modesty approaches, we at AFFotD are here to celebrate this glorious day.

But even great things like Halloween can have a dark side.  An awesome dark side.

We are of course talking about…ZOMBIES.

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The Conspiracy Theorist’s Guide to Groceries

Posted on October 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Hatchets were invented by Aliens to trick the Navajo into alcoholism!”

~Francis Firegrove, AFFotD Conspiracy Theorist


A few months back we introduced you to one of our more…eccentric writers in the AFFotD office.  Francis Firegrove has some…well, interesting thoughts that thankfully are easy to ignore.  Hell, it livens up our lunch break to no end just watching Firegrove rung around swatting cantaloupes out of people’s hands screaming, “NO IT’S MADE OF LISTERIA!” (…wait what?  He’s actually right about that?  Haha, holy shit).

Of course, the problem with hiring a certified nutjob is that, on occasion, you have to…well, let him speak.  Contractually.  In retrospect, we don’t really know what we were on when we decided to add Firegrove to our staff…

Ha, oh right.

Well, either way, we might as well get this over with.  If we don’t get Firegrove an article each calendar month, he technically becomes the majority owner of AFFotD.  Yeah we don’t know the legality of that either, but this is the last time we’re writing a contract on the back of a Denny’s menu, we’ll tell you that.

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The Informative American’s Guide to Proper American Eating (Originally Published June, 1954)

Posted on October 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Casseroles, barbecues, and blind bigotry, that’s what I’m all about!”

~Cooks in the 1950’s


“I like bacon.  I find pork in general to be unthreatening because, like me, it is white and can’t be eaten by the Jews.”

America Fun Fact of the Day likes to talk about food.  A lot.  And sometimes we have Wendy’s sponsor it.  We hype food, and fatty foods in particular, so much that many of you privately wonder if we have a vested interest in the success of the Rascal Scooter company.  That’s because eating is a truly American pastime, and eating ridiculously has been around as long as heart attacks.

There’s only one AFFotD staff member who was part of our team back in the 1950’s when we were a somewhat bigoted bi-weekly publication called “The Informative American.”  He’s in his late 80’s now, and we basically keep him around out of deference to the old guard, since he doesn’t do much other than demand that we come up with more offensive slurs for Mexicans.  However, he did inform us that food has always been as gloriously unhealthy, even back in the 1950’s.  He then added something about not liking it when Puerto Ricans touch his food, but we had been tuning him out at that point.

Sure enough, digging through our backlog of The Informative American pamphlets, we did find an interesting time in American culinary history, where mashing all the foods you could think of together was called a “wholesome family meal” and when there were videos made telling “little Billy” that he’ll get a tummy ache if he eats his bacon too quickly.  It truly was a fascinating time in America culinary history, without any of those pesky “gourmet ingredients that are fancier than Velveeta” or “any knowledge of the existence of soy products.”  So in honor of these simpler times, we present to you, unedited from its original form…

The Informative American’s Guide to Proper American Eating (Originally Published June, 1954)

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The America Fun Fact of the Day Guide to Performing a Hostile Corporate Takeover

Posted on September 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Just walk away, and we will spare your lives.”

~AFFotD’s Business Negotiator


At AFFotD we often focus on presenting you, the American public, important facts about American life.  And while we’d like to think we offer a unique perspective, or at the very least provide you with previously unknown details of important American facts, there isn’t much instructional benefits to our fun facts.  We write you an article informing you that gluing three guns together is incredibly American, but don’t offer any tutorial on how to properly and safely make your own three pronged glued gun at home.  You can learn how Davy Crockett could split a bullet in half by shooting it at an ax, but we don’t offer much in the way of demonstration.

We aim to change that today.

We at AFFotD will now begin combining our award winning fun facts with American instructional articles, with the hope that you can follow our American instruction to live life in an American fashion.  So that is why we today present to you…

The America Fun Fact of the Day Guide to Performing a Hostile Corporate Takeover

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America’s Seven Deadly Sins

Posted on September 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Let’s see… and greed makes all seven.  Sweet.”

~ Charlie Sheen

Religion is a sticky subject in America.  Everyone has a strong opinion of it, except for agnostics who are just lazy, and it can lead to uncomfortable arguments.  And if there’s one thing we dislike at AFFotD, it’s sobriety.  And if there’s two things we dislike, it’s sobriety and foreigners.  But if you go down the list of things we hate far enough, you eventually find “pointless arguments” in there somewhere.  So we’re not going to weigh in on this “big picture” item, and instead are just going to look into one particular aspect of one particular religion that has taken a bigger role in popular culture.  The Seven Deadly Sins.  You might have heard of it?  These are things that Christians try to avoid, and probably all those other religions that speak in silly languages don’t like either.  Ringing any bells?  They were central to the plot of that movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head?  You know, Iron Man?

“What’s in the box?  WHAT’S IN THE BOX?”

Anyway, for those of you unsure what the hell our sinful selves are talking about, there’s Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride.  We don’t know that because we’re religious, necessarily, we just know that because we sort of view them less as “things you shouldn’t do” and more as “American guidelines.”  As we were watching that Jessica Alba/Angelina Jolie from-like-four-years-ago-when-they-were-even-hotter lesbian sex tape that we own the only physical copy of as training motivation for our daily office hot dog eating contest, we started to wonder if we as Americans could do the deadly sins justice.  That’s when Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis got in a fight over who was more jealous of the rest of the staff who was away on nap time, and Michael Jordan just kept looking at himself in the mirror and playing a game of blackjack against himself, and we realized that…goddamn the deadly sins are American.  America is the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins.  And that’s awesome.

So, we’re going to run down how American each sin is, and after this article, the term “Seven Deadly Sins” will now be called “Seven Awesome American Traits.”  Fucking deal, Satan.

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America Fun Fact of the Day 9/24- Saturday Image of the Week

Posted on September 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Heh. Other cultures are…silly.”

~Johnny Roosevelt

American is clearly the language of business.  Everyone needs to know it, and if they don’t they’re an idiot.  Think about it- someone comes to you talking in Eastern Europe-y jibberjabber, and you think, “Goddamn it asshole, learn English.”  And then, you go to Italy, and someone doesn’t speak English, you think, “Goddamn it asshole, learn English.”

That’s why nothing is funnier than officials getting English hilariously wrong.  Because, come on dumbasses, you were born speaking American.  Right?  Probably.  Anyway, here’s the picture.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

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The Informative American Presents: Buddy Holly, Destroyer of Morals (Originally published January, 1959)

Posted on September 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Rock music and tight-fitting sweaters, nothing is more terrifying to me than these two evils.”

~Old white people in the 1950’s


Hindsight is the greatest.  If you fire enough people and admit something like, “oh I guess natural gas is highly flammable” or “in retrospect, maybe Gays should be allowed to serve in the military,” you can pretty much come off smelling like roses, while appearing “progressive” and “innovative.”  And we at AFFotD are no different.  We’re the first one’s telling you about the glory that is beef jerky potato chips, and as soon as the ghost of Charlton Heston shows up to tell us that the secret ingredient is people, we’ll be the first to tell you that people are fucking delicious.

What we’re trying to say is that we’re not always right about things, and the best way to make everyone totally forget about the terrible, terrible mistakes you’ve made in the past is to make very efficient cars  acknowledge your flaws and put them behind you.

What brings this up, as you no doubt suspected, has to do with our 1950s bi-weekly pamphlets we used to distribute, called “The Informative American.”  We like to go through them from time to time, laughing at the antiquated way most social situations were handled at the time, while cringing at some of the more blatant racism.  It was while going through these that we found a little gem from early 1959 about Buddy Holly.

Now don’t get us wrong, Buddy Holly is clearly American, and is the most responsible person for modern Rock and Roll that wasn’t a black group obfuscated by a racist culture.  But back then, he was clashing a bit with our office’s more conservative ideals.  They didn’t like him.

So now, without further adieu, AFFotD presents an…unfortunately timed release (it came out less than a month before Holly’s untimely death)…

The Informative American Presents:  Buddy Holly, Destroyer of Morals (Originally published January, 1959)

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American Fun Fact of the Day 9/17- Saturday Image of the Week

Posted on September 17, 2011 | 2 comments

“Finally found this fucking picture.”

~Johnny Roosevelt

It’s Saturday, which means it’s another opportunity for us to forgo responsibility and post a picture instead of some sort of meaningful article about, we don’t know, isinglass.  Fish swim bladders for booze.  Holy shit we absolutely need to write about that now.

Anyway, here’s a man drowning in beer.

 

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Air Shows: Americanly Crazy, or Just American?

Posted on September 16, 2011 | 1 comment

“Shit yes I enjoy those things, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

~Chuck Yeager


What does America like in its entertainment?  Nudity?  Well yes.  But barring that, what else?  Action?  Adventure?  The very real chance that you could watch someone straight up die before your very eyes?  Goddamn right, this is America, we like our steaks heart-attacky, we want our bratwurst gummy-bear-y, and we prefer for our entertainment to be riddled with schadenfreude.  With the recent Chicago Air and Water Show seeing 1.7 million people flock to it despite stormy conditions, then, it only makes sense that Air Shows have a special place in America’s heart.

Because even when wing walkers fall to their death we’ll still watch the shit out of them, making it the second bloodiest sport in America to get millions of excited spectators (next to football, of course).  So that’s why we’re here to celebrate the pointless recklessness that is… Air Shows.

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