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Category Archives: Miscellaneous America
The History of the Professional Indoor Football League
Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Athletes, Strange America
Tagged Alabama Hammers, America, championship game, Columbus Lions, Erie Explosion, football team, IFL, indoor football, Indoor Football League, indoor football team, Lehigh Valley Steelhawks, Nashville Venom, National Professional American Indoor Football Week, PIFL, Professional Indoor Football League, Richmond Raiders, Trenton Freedom
The History of The Indoor Football League
“My boy plays in a football league! He’s going to make it to the NFL one day, just like that Drew Brady!”
~The Mother of an Indoor Football League quarterback
Two years ago, we talked about the American Indoor Football League, now just called “American Indoor Football”, a hilariously small, 10 team semi-professional football league that exists in such hotbed communities in dire need of a professional sports franchise such as Laurel, Maryland, the 25,000 population home of the defending AIFL champions, the Maryland Eagles. We delved into the rich and honestly haphazard history of the league operating under the motto of “Fast Paced Family Fun” and gently prodded this league that probably doesn’t really need to exist. We had a good time, and got to write about football in a way that doesn’t help Roger Goodell’s brand, so it really was a double win for us.
In a fit of nostalgia, we revisited this topic only to find that American Indoor Football is hardly alone in the field of “leagues of traveling semi-pro football teams getting paid peanuts to hit each other for the amusement of literally of dozens of fans.” No, America is a land rich with high school varsity players just out of college desperate for a chance to relive their glory days, so we’re not content with simply one non-Arena-Football-League-knock-off. And this week, we’re going to introduce you to three more.
That’s right, it’s National Professional American Indoor Football Week here in America (according to a sentence we just made up) so what better way to celebrate than to give three of these leagues (yup, we’ve got three distinct leagues here) their due, and introduce you to your new favorite teams to root for when your car breaks down in Sioux Falls and you just decide to shrug and start a new life there instead of paying for a new transmission. First up—the inventively named Indoor Football League.
The History of The Indoor Football League
Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Athletes, Strange America
Tagged America, American Indoor Football, Arena Football League, Bemidji Axemen, Billings Wolves, Canadian Football League, Cedar Rapids Titans, Football, Football League, Green Bay Blizzard, Green Bay Packers, IFL, indoor football, Indoor Football League, Intense Football League, Iowa Barnstormers, Nebraska Danger, Sioux Falls Storm, Tri-City Fever, Wichita Falls nighthawks
The Toledo War: That One Time We Had States Go to War and Shoot at Each Other or Something
“No no no I want it I WANT IT!”
~Michigan and Ohio representatives
While we spend most of our time fixating on our general awesomeness, Americans often forget that we are one of the most diverse countries in the world, both ethnically and ideologically. When you take a moment and consider the vast differences in language and culture in Europe, it’s not surprising that individual states in America, which could fit most of Europe within its borders, might have some different views than their neighbors. It’s why people from Massachusetts give New Yorkers a hard time, why most sports rivalries exist, and why if you put a Californian in a room with a Texan for thirty minutes, neither will emerge alive, sort of like putting two Siamese fighting fish in the same tank.
Now, we tend to dismiss rivalries between states because, in the grand scheme of thing, they’re just little local quirks of a particular part of the nation. Take Michigan and Ohio, for example. Those of you who follow College Football (read as: actual Americans) know that the University of Michigan and THE (ugh) Ohio State University have an institutionalized hatred for each other that most people reserve for the producers of the Twilight franchise. If you met someone from Michigan or Ohio, you make some joke at the other state’s expense, and they’d roll their eyes and go, “Ugh, yeah, fuck those guys.” That’s just how Americans identify with their local community, and it’s all in good fun. Naturally, we try not to take this too far into “irrational grudges” territory, because that’s just counterproductive. Ha, it’s not like we’ve ever had states go to war and shoot at each other or anything.
Oh wait, what’s that? What are you doing, article title?
The Toledo War: That One Time We Had States Go to War and Shoot at Each Other or Something
The Funniest Names of American Towns
“Ha, look at these funny names. At least I live somewhere with a normal and awesome name.”
Names are a lot like metaphors—we’ve never successfully created one. But, when we really think about it, our comfort with the names of most people, places, or things come from a level of familiarity—we don’t think twice about the name “Jonathan” but the first time some parents gave that name to their kid, they were probably viewed as whatever you’d call hippies during the Bible days.
The point being, names are weird, until you let yourself get used to them. But sometimes, a name is just…well, weird, and no amount of time will make it seem normal. This is especially true with certain towns you might find on the Wikipedia entry for “unusual place names.” The fact is, you don’t see a lot of new towns sprout up that often, so most of the names we have are pretty much set in stone, and they’ve had time for us to adjust. We talk about New York and never pause to think about Old York, we read about Chicago and never stop to think about how it’s really a gibberish word, and we only reference the fact that Los Angeles means The Angels when we’re a private investigator giving a gritty monologue at the beginning of a film noir.
So for a town to have an “unusual” name, it’s likely not to be a case of a town that just got named and we haven’t had time to get used to it. No, these town names are hilarious, and absolutely not the name of a place you’d be proud to live. Let’s take a look at America’s funniest town names.
The Funniest Names of American Towns
AFFotD’s Strangest Search Engine Hits
“Ha, sorry guys, no titties here.”
~AffotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt
Running a website dedicated to Americanness in all of its makingupnessofwordsness forms is a lot like being God. You wield total power (not only can we delete your comments if we don’t like them, we can edit the text of your comment to make you seem stupid), you are totally in charge of what people can see, and most people don’t have a clue if you exist or not. Do we let this power go to our head? Oh, absolutely.
But there’s another aspect to maintaining AFFotD that you might not immediately assume—when you find our website through a google search, it lets us know what you searched for that led you to read our website. A lot of the times, it’s not anything that’s particularly surprising. For example, our most searched item is “Popcorn Sutton” because we wrote an article about Popcorn Sutton that had some, well, less than ideal writing decisions, but people finding our site searching that name, that just makes sense. Additionally, we’ve had over 2,000 people find our page searching for “ugly cow” because we once wrote an article that had a picture of an ugly cow. Google is not nearly as sophisticated as all their algorithm talk would have you believe.
“Ha, that cow is CRAZY!”
~Google Executives
Naturally, people will use odd and occasionally sketchy search terms that somehow leads to them stumbling onto our site. These search engine hits generally range from “very strange” to “ha ha ha ha oh man y’all search for boobs a lot, you’re going to be really pissed off when you click that link and end up staring at a grizzly bear toting a shotgun.” Today, we’re going to focus on some of the weirder terms we’ve run into.
AFFotD’s Strangest Search Engine Hits
Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Strange America
Tagged AFFotD, America, google image search, google search, Meta, Search Engine Hits
Wherein AFFotD Screams “Are You Fucking Kidding Me, They’re BUGS” With Righteous Frustration Towards the Fiends at the Mother Nature Network
“The Vegans are coming, the vegans are coming!”
~AFFotD Office Sentries
Hi. This might seem like an extreme non-sequitur, but vegans kind of hate us, largely because we loathe vegans. We say “meat is the best part of living, ergo, vegans are zombies, and we must destroy their brains” and they flock to our site to say “You are a total ignoramus! Feel sorry for you! Enjoy your rectal cancer ugly people” because that’s an actual comment left on this website by someone who was mad at us making fun of vegan diets and apparently 95% of America’s vegan population doesn’t have a sense of humor. The other 5% are no longer vegan because they just succumbed to their base urges, and started eating someone’s brains (because they’re fucking zombies) (but brains aren’t vegan) (so they’re not vegan anymore) (just zombies).
This will all make sense in a little bit, but first, let’s talk about eating bugs.
A surprising amount of cultures include insects as part of their basic diets. This is called Entomophagy, which is Latin for “eww gross, ha ha, it’s all crawly, hee hee.” It’s common in developing nations, but lately, taboos about eating bugs are being challenged in first world countries like America by nutritionists pointing out that insects are high in protein, efficient to produce for consumption, and aren’t that gross just grow the fuck up, you haven’t even tried it, okay, just take one bite and if you don’t like it we’ll let you have some chicken.
Our stance on the issue might be surprising to those of you expecting us to demand that the world eat a diet of only bacon and steak (which, admittedly, not a bad call) but we’re totally for people eating bugs. Some of our writers have actually done so (not in the “eating worms on the playground to make friends because they were lonely children” way…well, not exclusively that way) and they said they were delicious. People think of eating bugs as digging into worming live messes, which is gross, but it’s also gross trying to bite into a chicken’s thigh as it runs for its life. Cooked and prepared insects can be surprisingly good—crickets taste like shrimp, most larvae are kind of mushroomy, crickets are deep fried so they taste like everything that’s deep fried (delicious), and some other insects even taste like bacon. All of these are good things! We guess some people like the “sustainability” of the food source, but we don’t care—we’ll always welcome an added excuse to try to eat something that once lived on this Earth and has been killed specifically to address the fact that we’ve been drinking since 4PM and man, we should probably get some food in there before going out to the bars.
So to bring our two points together.
Our friends at the Mother Nature Network (sarcasm) posted an article a few months back by their blogger, “Starre Vartan,” entitled, “Eating insects is better than eating meat, but is it any more ethical?” So we’re going to spend quite some time bashing our head into a wall for a while, and writing down whatever curse words come to mind in the process. Enjoy.
Wherein AFFotD Screams “Are You Fucking Kidding Me, They’re BUGS” With Righteous Frustration Towards the Fiends at the Mother Nature Network
Posted in Strange America
Tagged America, Bees, Bugs, eat bugs, honey, Insects, Mother Nature Network, Vegan, vegan diet
The Craziest Nuclear Weapon Plans In American History
Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Strange America
Tagged America, Carl Sagan, Cold War, Davy Crockett, Fat Man, Insanity, LBJ, Little Boy, moon, Nuclear Bombs, Nuclear Plans, Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile, nuclear reactor, nuclear weapons, Operation Argus, Outer Space, Project A119, Project Orion, Project Pluto, Russia, Space
The 2014 T-Shirt Line From The Mountain (Retrospectively)
“Wait, it’s been over a year since we wrote about The Mountain? Shit, get on it, gentlemen!”
~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt
We normally start off these columns saying, “By now, you probably know our relationship with The Mountain” but, in all actuality, we’ve sort of let things slip a bit in the AFFotD offices. Normally, two, three, fuck it, four times a year, we’d see that The Mountain had a new Big Face line of shirts, or a Holiday series, and just talk about the glorious insanity that are the shirt designs made by the company that brought you a lot of funny amazon.com user reviews. Sometimes, the head of the company (no seriously) would even check in to either snark at us or joke along with us in response to our articles. Is this what being famous is like? Probably not! But either way, we always tried to check in with our pals at The Mountain to see what new brands of insanity they wanted to cover people’s man boobs with.
We weren’t particularly great about that in 2014, which is why when we went to The Mountain to see what’s up, we were greeted with a whole slew of T-shirts we hadn’t seen before. So, naturally, it was time for us to pick out some of the more meth-is-a-helluva-drug ones and let you know about them. Get ready, folks, these get a little weird.
The 2014 T-Shirt Line From The Mountain (Retrospectively)
Jog N’ Vom: America’s Official Food and Drink Races
“Chug chug chug chug chew chew chew chew run run run run!”
~Only the Most American of Runners
Americans either love or hate exercising. Sure, you can find some middle ground of, people that guess they should go for a jog today, but generally speaking, you have two camps of American exercisers—the kind of person that gets really into their workout journal, and the kind of person who actively brags that they go out of the way to limit their day to day physical exertions as much as possible. The stereotypes are in place—you have the cross-fit trainer on a Paleo diet, or you have the overweight American chugging a beer while eating a ChipoHut Taco (that’s where you take a Chipotle burrito, put it inside a full Pizza Hut pizza, and fold the whole thing into a massive taco).
Naturally, the latter is the more American option. However, in the past few years, people who “exercise” and “take care of their bodies” and “can go up a flight of stairs without running out of breath” have seemingly taken a hard look at themselves and said, “Yes, I should still exercise, but maybe I can find a way to do it while also being a little unhealthy, which sounds a lot more fun.”
We’ve coined a term for this kind of slightly unhealthy, exponentially more fun exercise—the Jog N’ Vom. Basically, dozens of races have sprung up across America that don’t want you to just run an arbitrary distance while they time you—they want you to incorporate drinking or eating something super unhealthy into your run, turning your 5K into an eating or drinking competition, which is a wonderful thing.
So, for you health nuts out there that still want to be the best American you can be, we present with you a (fairly) comprehensive list of the races that let you be bad while being good.
Jog N’ Vom: America’s Official Food and Drink Races
Posted in America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats, Pizza Pizza, Strange America, Strange Foods
Tagged America, April Fool's Twinkie Race, Bastille Day Baguette Relay Race, beer mile, Burrito Run, Chipotle, Chug chug chug chug, corndog classic, cupcake Run, Donut Dash, Donut Dash for CASA, Durham Doughman Relay, Hot Chocolate 15K, Jog, Jog N' Vom, Krispy Kreme, Krispy Kreme Challenge, NYC Cupcake Run, NYC Pizza Run, Pancake Race, pizza, Pizza Hut, Pizza Run, Run, San Diego Burrito Run, twinkie, Twinkie Race
America’s Whackiest Obscure Whack Job Conspiracy Theories
“Oh my God, you’re crazy, and we love it.”
~AFFotD staff-writers to conspiracy theorists
So here’s a story. We wrote, a few years back, an article about the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876. It’s a relatively obscure “ha, what?” event that’s slightly less well known among your average American than, say, the London Beer Flood of 1814. Now, recently, the Kentucky Meat Shower has gotten some additional traffic, which is very cool for us because it means we get to buy more expensive whiskeys for next week, or at the very least a gold chalice to drink it from. However, it also started a bit of a conversation in the comments section with an individual who, as far as we can tell, believes that a cloaked alien spaceship that’s 5 miles wide grows human babies as if they were corn to harvest their lung tissue, which is compatible with their species, and a “batch” went bad and had to be dumped, which lead to the Kentucky Meat Shower.
Make no mistake about it, this is a crazy thing to say. This is the kind of thing that a crazy person would say to someone while fully believing that they are not crazy, even though they are. Crazy. So very fucking crazy. We were obviously amused by it (because of the crazy) and terrified by it (when they got to saying “what’s so evil about grinding up babies” we had to get the fuck out of there) but it led us to a realization.
There are a lot of total amazing whack job conspiracies out there. And we should talk about them. So let’s do that.
America’s Whackiest Obscure Whack Job Conspiracy Theories
Posted in Strange America
Tagged America, Antarctica, Conspiracy Theories, conspiracy theorists, Conspiracy Theory, Eyes Wide Shut, Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, Illuminati, India, iraq, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kentucky Meat Shower, Lizard people, Mark Twain, NASA, Nazi, Nazis, Nicole Kidman, Nukes in India, Saddam Hussein, Stanley Kubrick, stargate
America Fun Fact of the Day 