Category Archives: America’s Greatest Fun Facts

An approximate list of the finest Fun Facts to grace the internet lined walls of affotd.com. If you’re a first time visitor, or someone who wants to read a classic post from months ago, this page is for you.

The Definitive Ranking of Every Ted Lasso Character (Season 1)

Posted on April 21, 2021 | 3 comments

 “Be Curious. Not Judgmental.”

~Ted Lasso

Apple_TV_Ted_Lasso_key_art_sh_cr

So a little known fact about 2020 is that, apparently, for a lot of people it was not great! Yeah, color us surprised, our staff spent the whole year on a private island (after 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine why are you all mad?) so it was news to us.

But in a, let’s say, “down year”, one of the universally acknowledged high points of 2020 was the release of Ted Lasso, the Golden Globe-winning comedy that was the primary reason you either got Apple TV+ or figured out how to pirate tv shows.

If you haven’t seen it, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING THIS PAST YEAR THIS SHOW IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEEDED!?!?!? But we’ll pretend you’re a hypothetical reader unaware of this delightful show. Starring Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso had no reason to be as good as it is. It was based off an NBC Sports ad made seven years ago, which is basically like turning an SNL sketch into a movie (which usually does not go well) and making it six times as long.

Yet, with an impressive creative team behind it, including Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, it somehow ended up the EXACT show we needed for this past year. It’s heartwarming, sincere, charming and kind, without any cynicism or irony. Even the bad guys in the show find a way to make you root for them (well, except for a few).

All of this is to say, we have decided to celebrate the release of the official season two teaser trailer. by spending dozens of hours on research and writing 5,000 words to arbitrarily rank every single character from Season 1 of Ted Lasso.

Now, you might be disappointed with some choices in this list, but there’s no way you’ll be actively upset, because Ted Lasso is the rare show that, in a single short season (so far) (it’s locked in to end after Season 3), has already established a good 20 characters you’d take a bullet for. So with that in mind, let’s get this underway.

Every Ted Lasso Character, Ranked

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Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Greatest Fun Facts, The Rest of Them

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Who Fucked Up Part 2: How States Are Handling Reopening One Month Since Our Last Check-in

Posted on July 14, 2020 | 6 comments

“You know the more we write in-depth articles on this, the less we’re able to get away with ‘if you don’t like this lol ignore us we’re dumb’ right?”

~AFFotD’s Lawyers

covid july

Oh boy…

Last month, we sat down and wrote 18,000 words in a very off-brand attempt to take a snapshot at how each state and territory was handling closing and reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of those 18,000 words, 149 were “fuck”, 89 were “fucked”, 20 were “fucking” and we tossed in a single instance of fucker and fuckers in there for good measure. This is the level of discourse we bring to the table here at America Fun Fact of the Day.

The reaction was actually far less angry than we anticipated—we had one guy gripe that our article was “dumb” and that there was a lot of “needless profanity.” Keep in mind, this was an individual who willingly read a punishingly massive article called “Who Fucked Up” so the term dumb is kind of relative, isn’t it?

Anyway, similarly, our follow up to that article is a very stupid and pointless enterprise. You should know going into this, we’re not doctors, we’re not trying to be political but somehow us talking about masks will be viewed as such, and we swear a bunch and write while drunk. If you care enough about our opinion to get upset, you really need to re-evaluate how you consume your news, Tucker.

Obviously when we made the decision to write this article two weeks ago, things looked a little less….um…listen we want to keep this light and humorous because the world is on fire and we might as well play some pretty songs while we go down with this ship.

So let’s do this! We’re going to list every state and territory, showing how they looked in June and how they look now. We’ll do a basic rundown of the initial shutdowns and reopenings of each one, reveal if we thought they had fucked up at the time, discuss any further reopenings (or, sigh, new closings), and finally we’ll ask have they fucked up, or are they fucking up.

It’s very scientific. And by scientific, we mean, what’s the opposite of scientific? Oh right, drunk people looking at charts and making broad generalizations about a very serious thing while shoehorning in some dick jokes. GodDAMNit we didn’t make a joke about Florida looking like a wang in our last article, did we? We should rectify that.

Sorry, we got distracted for a moment. ANYWAY. HERE WE GO.

Who Fucked Up Part 2: How States Are Handling Reopening One Month Since Our Last Check-in

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, Fuck Nature

The Most Terrifying Products Marketed For Lonely People

Posted on April 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

“OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE.”

~Single people

um wut

It can be rough out there for single Americans, to the point that you can pretty much will below-average R-rated comedies into existence just by giving it a name of “How to be Single.”

There are millions of Americans for whom the dating scene oscillates between shitty Tinder dates and long, depressing walks through parks that are impossibly filled with happy couples while “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays from an unseen speaker system that somehow seems to be following you everywhere you go (it’s actually being played through an iPhone of a kid that their ex paid to follow them around to torment them because their ex is a goddamn monster).

For many in this position, it seems like every product on the market other than two buck Chuck and Sharper Image neck massagers are happy-couple focused items that just rub your singledom in your face. Goddamn it, most couples don’t even want to buy a tandem bike, why are you putting out a full page ad for one in this week’s Maxim?

The point being, 50% of Americans are single, and those 50% are distributed between Americans in relationships, Americans who don’t want to settle down and want to “live the single life,” and Americans who feel, well, kind of lonely about their lack of a mate.

There’s also like, the five people who say they’re “single and ready to mingle” while doing that finger-guns thing, but there’s pending legislation going through the senate to ensure that those guys get their US citizenship removed.

But of those three groups of unmarried Americans, it’s, not surprisingly, the lonely people that can end up being a bit forgotten and left behind.  Sure, Buzzfeed is legally required to post a Liz-Lemon-gif-heavy article about “13 signs you’re an introvert” every month, but ever since Netflix got claimed by people using it to have sex, it’s hard for lonely people to find products and services that are really tailored for them.

Thankfully, entrepreneurs are starting to realize that there’s a huge untapped marketplace, filled with young, active Americans with gobs of disposable income not going towards Valentine’s Day gifts and wedding planning and *pauses and changes course once we notice that our single readers have begun sobbing*. Unfortunately, most of these entrepreneurs are goddamn psychopaths, and their cure for loneliness is nightmare fuel.

The Most Terrifying Products Marketed For Lonely People

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Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, America's Greatest Fun Facts, Strange America

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The Greatest Culinary Crimes Perpetrated by the British

Posted on June 9, 2015 | 14 comments

“I’m sorry, there’s no one here with that job title.”

~AFFotD’s Cultural Sensitivity Officer

british flag

America has always had an uncomfortable relationship with England, sort of like a second husband trying to be polite to his wife’s ex when he comes by to take his kid for the weekend.  Like, we’re friendly enough, but deep down we kind of suspect they resent us for taking what they once had.  We don’t say this to make any larger point about England and America, or even their alliance and history throughout the years, because nothing about this post is going to be diplomatic, smart, or even particularly well-informed.  We’re here to make fun of British food.

We talk about food a lot here, and for good reason—America is a land of delicious and largely unhealthy delicacies, and frankly we think it’s a little rude for you to respond to our eager descriptions of insane fried foods with something like, “Dear God, according to your cholesterol levels you should be dead,” Doctor Fredricks.  And we make fun of other countries a lot here, because we think America is the greatest and we kind of get defensive when people imply otherwise.  Oh that’s great, Switzerland, your country is the happiest in the world, well fuck off we have nukes and guns we’re better than you FOOTBALLLLLL.

Ahem.

More to the point, considering how often we talk about American food in all its wondrous incarnations, it’s important to remind ourselves that light cannot exist without darkness.  American food is the light.  British food is…well there’s a reason we make fun of British food.  This is the reason.  These foods are the reasons.

The Greatest Culinary Crimes Perpetrated by the British

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, England, Insulting Foreigners

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The Medal of Honor from 1871-1917: The Military Honor America Couldn’t Seem To Give Away Fast Enough

Posted on May 12, 2015 | 4 comments

“No, seriously, you have to stop printing these like Thin Mints.  What’s it gonna take, an actual major war to make you chill?”

~Smedley Butler, trying to turn down a Medal of Honor in the early 20th century

medal of honor

We’re going to start this one off with a disclaimer—any claims we make regarding the Medal of Honor is a reflection of how politicians and military leaders handed out the honor before we really had any intense modern wars under our belt.  Our servicemen that fought in the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or the many other excursions where they have put their lives on the line for their brothers and for their country have paid dearly for our benefit, and every single recipient of the Medal of Honor can, at worst, be called a hero (at best they can be called “basically Batman, if Batman could get free beer and deserved gratitude sex whenever they want”).

Even when we make fun of the skirmishes that resulted in Medals of honor being handed out during the time period of 1869 (when we had kind of forgotten what the Civil War was like) to 1917 (when we started World War I and realized, holy shit, this shit is super intense), we’re acknowledging that the soldiers who were awarded did show valor and a love of this country.  They just happened to get an award that was handed out to pretty much anyone who asked for it up until recently.  Let’s put it this way—Congress gave out 1522 Medal of Honors in the Civil War, of which 32 were posthumous.  Now, the American Civil War was a bloody and bitterly fought war, but when you consider the fact that we awarded only 464 during the entirety of World War II (266 posthumously by the way), or that we’ve only given out 16 (7 of which were to fallen soldiers) of these awards in the Afghanistan and Iraqi War combined, you can see how we’ve increasingly made the honor harder and harder to get.  The Congressional Medal of Honor, as we know it know, is the most prestigious and rare award for those who have gone above and beyond their duty to keep freedom within these borders—for those of you with a loose idea of what military action generally means, this is the award a soldier gets when doing something so brave and so intense that, if you saw it in a movie, you’d respond, “Oh, come on, the director’s really taking some liberties with this battle to make it seem more exciting.”

So currently, yes, the Medal of Honor is given out only in the most extraordinary and harrowing cases , but during the time period between the end of the Civil War and start of World War I?  Well, at that point it was more…

The Medal of Honor from 1871-1917: The Military Honor America Couldn’t Seem To Give Away Fast Enough

 more medals of honor

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Posted in 19th Century Factoids, 20th Century Insanity, America's Greatest Fun Facts, American Heroes, Fighters

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AFFotD Book Review: Smooth Talking by Mohammed Zubair

Posted on April 7, 2015 | 3 comments

“Ha-ha!  Hu-man interaction!”

~Mohammed Zubair

smooth talking

Self-published books are one of our best sources for pure, distilled ego and delusion.  It takes a certain kind of person to say, “Well, I can’t get a literary agent, or a publisher, but my words must be read via kindle, so I shall do this myself!” This is directly responsible for a whole slew of intentionally and unintentionally (mostly unintentionally) hilarious books, with some of them managing to tackle topics other than fucking dinosaurs.

Similarly, pickup artists are one of our best sources for cringeworthy attempts to dilute 50% of our population into basically stop lights with vaginas, where people who, in theory, have had sex a few times with strangers have decided that they must tell their “secrets” to the world, which ends up being about as interesting as listening to a man shouting on the bus about getting a blowjob in an alleyway this one time.  As long as you don’t take it seriously (and please, don’t, that implies they’re saying serious things) this too is a hilarious source of pure, distilled ego and delusion, as well as the most awkward almost alien attempts to mimic hu-man ver-bal interactions in existence.

With that in mind, we stumbled across this little doozy of a book by one Mohammed Zubair, who promises to give you over 500 examples of conversation starters so that you can achieve the one thing you, assuming you’re a male, or a lesbian we guess, were put on this planet to do—have grossly unsatisfying sex with someone you recently met at a bar.  It’s incredible, and so, so awkward, and we had to tell you about it.  It’s book review time!

AFFotD Book Review:  Smooth Talking by Mohammed Zubair

intro to book smooth talker

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, Strange America

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The American Evolution Of Seasoning and Spicy Foods

Posted on December 17, 2013 | 3 comments

*pop*

*hssssss*

“…Gas?  GAS!  GAAASSSSSS!  MASKS ON!  MASKS ON GODDAMN IT!  OH GOD TOO LATE!!!!”

~Residents of Irwindale, CA                                         

oatmeal sriracha bear

(source)

The American Evolution Of Seasoning and Spicy Foods

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Posted in America's Best Foods, America's Greatest Fun Facts

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M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 35 comments

“They melt in your heart, not in your OH MOTHER OF GOD SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.”

~Rejected M&M slogan

M&Ms

In 1941, Forrest Mars, Sr., son of the Mars Company founder Frank C. Mars, patented a process for tempering a hard shell of chocolate around chocolate pellets in order to prevent the candies from melting.  Production immediately began under the name M&M Limited (named for Mars and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey’s chocolate with a 20% stake in the product), with an agreement to only use Hershey chocolate.  These button-shaped candies exploded in popularity during the second World War due to their durability, and the shells were given bright colors such as yellow, green, red, and violet to go along with standard brown-colored shells.  And with that, an American institution was created.

These “m” printed candies are now sold in over 100 countries, but remain the most popular to-go chocolate snack for Americans everywhere.  The simple elegance of the coated milk chocolate delivers a burst of flavor with each individual candy, and just thinking about M&Ms while reading this article has you saying, “Goddamn it, I really want a bag of M&M’s right now.”  And you should.

Throughout the years we’ve been sampling the best of America, we’ve learned through painful, gut-wrenching trial and error, that sometimes the best American ideas are cruelly marred by our at-times overzealous imaginations.  Yes, the same good intentions and terrible execution that gave us Watermelon Oreos has befallen the perfection that is the M&M candy.  And, as is our sworn duty, we are here to let you know that these mistakes exist, because it’s only when we see those we care about at their ugliest that we can truly learn to love their beauty.  Or we just like telling you about terrifying candies.  However you want to look at it.

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

 printed m&ms

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, Strange Foods

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America’s 10 Most Alcoholic Beers

Posted on April 17, 2013 | 26 comments

“Beer, motor fuel, semantics.”

~American Brewers

brewmeister armageddon

For years, media sources have been discussing how “Macro” beers such as Budweiser, Coors, and piss Miller have lost ground to the niche market of craft breweries (which the macro breweries buy for themselves).

There has been a lot of speculation as to the reason for this—microbrews tend to use better ingredients to make creative, delicious, flavorful beers that blow their much more watered down counterparts out of the water.  They are a new, thriving addition to an alcohol producing landscape that until the mid 2010s was remarkably stagnant.  Hell, microbrews even offer a wide variety of complex beer styles that can be paired with any meal, as opposed to Bud Light, which is only paired with Solo Cups and roofies.

Yes, all of those can explain the surge of craft beers, but if we had to guess, the main reason behind their success rests with the fact that we’re all American, and craft beers just tend to get you drunk faster.  You can doll it up all you want, but most Americans would rather spend a few more bucks on a tasty beer as opposed to a domestic brew that’s got half the alcohol.  That’s just simple economics.

So in order to celebrate America’s contributions to getting you drunk while drinking as little liquid as possible, we at AFFotD are here to present you with…

America’s 10 Most Alcoholic Beers

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, Beer!

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[REDACTED] Reviews The Recycle Rap

Posted on March 12, 2013 | 4 comments

“Oh this is awful.  Let’s put [REDACTED] on it, I guess.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt

everything is terrible

We don’t necessarily go out of our way to hawk other people’s websites, but every once in a while we have to give a site its credit when they post a video that’s so great we’ll want to discuss it, or so horrible we’ll force our undercover investigator, [REDACTED], to review it.  In this case, the blog Everything Is Terrible was more than willing to supply us with, well, one of those terrible ones.  Specifically, an awkward, probably 90’s, video of  awkward children rap about recycling.  You can take a moment to watch it if you like, but we can save you the pain by inflicting it on our poor, abused investigative journalist.

Ha ha, we love to make you suffer, [REDACTED]!

[REDACTED] Reviews The Recycle Rap

east180_1043555a

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Posted in America's Greatest Fun Facts, [REDACTED]

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