Category Archives: American Heroes

America is filled with everyday heroes who help make this country great. By reading America Fun Fact of the Day, you’ve proven that you yourself are also an American hero. And we salute you.

But there’s no way in hell we’re going to salute you by making a fun fact about you, since this page is reserved for REAL heroes. You know, the people who are important enough to get wikipedia pages and such.

Glorious Homeless Americans

Posted on February 16, 2011 | 3 comments

“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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Posted in The Best of the Rest

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John Wayne’s Pretty Darn American, Pard’ner

Posted on February 15, 2011 | 5 comments

“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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Billy Angry, Dome-Maker

Posted on February 11, 2011 | 1 comment

“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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Ernest Hemingway Punches With His Writing Hand

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 4 comments

“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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The American Tale of C. Dale Petersen

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 11 comments

“Guys, you gotta help me.  C. Dale Petersen is after me.  You gotta help, I’m…I’m so scared…”

~Rambo

When the America Fun Fact of the Day staff goes on manly-adventure-excursions, or “Manventursions” as we refer to them, we usually have a break in the program right after “extreme skydiving” and right before the jalapeño peppers eating contest so we can silently reflect on how manly and awesome we are.  J

ohnny Roosevelt, our editor-in-chief and the grandson of Teddy, regales us with stories of celebrity sexual conquests (Jessica Alba and Kathleen Turner on the same night, and Kathleen still had moves) and unbelievable feats of strength (he straight up knocked out Arnold Schwarzenegger in a game of Knuckles Roulette).  Our accountant talked about how he went to jail for murdering an elephant in a public zoo.  However, our photoshop guy ruined the mood when he kept bitching about how we never use photoshopped pictures, and just steal shit off of google images, which was the opposite of manly.  So we fired him.  With fire.

“YOUR JOB IS SO EXPENDABLE, BILLY!”

After the embers cleared we all had a great laugh until we stumbled upon a plaque that proved that, no matter how hard we try, how many Midget Tossing records we hold, or how many geriatric three-ways we pull off, we can never be manly enough.  Because we had seen true manliness, and all else seemed like a cheap imitation in comparison.

We are referring to C. Dale Petersen, a man so manly that if you ever said his complete first name out loud, your hand would spontaneously turn into a bouquet of dicks.

To recap the plaque pictured above, C. Dale Petersen ran into a royally pissed of Grizzly Bear.  C. Dale Petersen, who adhered to his personal credo of “Do not fuck with C. Dale Petersen,” rammed his fucking arm down the bear’s throat. And, at risk of using excessive italics, we must point out the fact that he then bit into the bear’s jugular vein to make it pass out before bashing it in the head with a stick to DEATH.

To recap.  This.  Throat.  Stick.  To death.

These actions are so manly they just gave Burt Reynolds a sex change operation.

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, Fighters

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