The National League Blacklisting of 1881

Posted on November 12, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Listen, we’re just sort of winging this as we go along.”

~1800s Major League Baseball Commissioners

We’ve been talking a lot about baseball in the past several months, which comes as a bit of a surprise considering that the sport is a topic we have very rarely discussed over the past four years. Yes, it’s America’s Pastime, but it’s also kind of boring from an outside perspective.

But we stumbled upon something when looking up the silliest Major League Baseball team names that we could find during their early years—before baseball was a bankable commodity, they pretty much let anyone pick up a bat and play for (not much) money. That led to crazy ballplayers, goofy names, and that one time where a guy got paid a full professional baseball salary to show up to an empty stadium every day and play himself in a disbanded league.

Baseball during the 19^th, and somewhat during the start of the 20^th, century was at times hilariously inept, completely marginalized, and interesting as fuck. So we’re going to look into our high tech time machine (read as: Googling shit while drunk) to bring you another chapter from the early annals of America’s most interesting sport that involves players standing still for the majority of each game.

The National League Blacklisting of 1881

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Posted in All things baseball, American Heroes, Athletes

Tagged 19th century baseball, America, Baseball, Blacklist of 1881, Buttercup Dickerson, Emil Gross, Lip Pike, Major League Baseball, Mike Dorgan, MLB, MLB Blacklist, National Association, National League, Pete Rose, Sadie Houck, The Only Nolan, William Hulbert

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

Posted on November 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

“It’s the greatest invention since sliced bread.”

~Literally every single salesperson you have ever met, every goddamn one

We take a lot of the simple things in our lives for granted. That’s just human nature—if something doesn’t look difficult, or inherently present itself as some technological triumph, we tend to assume that these have always existed.

We can marvel at the technology behind, say, a smart phone, but overlook the fact that the first calculator was made in 1959, looked like this, and was able to compute less than your smart phone’s calculator app.

We’re going about this in a roundabout way, but the moral here is that many assume sliced bread has been around since, oh, roughly the same time as bread and knives co-existed, when in reality it’s a 20^th century phenomenon.

Yes, sliced bread was first packaged and sold in 1928, and it is an American invention. Specifically, by an enterprising Midwesterner who devoted over ten years of his life to designing and perfecting a machine to slice whole loaves of bread at once to ensure that we would forever be able to take an arduous step out of the process of making toast and sandwiches. That man, nay, that hero, was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, and this is his story.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

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Posted in America's Best Foods, America's Culinary Treats, American Heroes, The Best of the Rest

Tagged America, bread, Otto Frederick Rohwedder, Sliced Bread

The Most Hilarious Debut Film Appearances of Famous Actors

Posted on November 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Mom, do you want my green stuff?”

~Matt Damon’s Actual First Line of Dialogue in a Film, Ever

Outside of winning the lottery or having a trust fund, success typically is earned through hard work and dedication. You have to start from somewhere. That’s most easily noticeable in the careers of actors, who work their way up to reach stardom and, as a result, tend to have some strange and unusual roles in their early acting days. For as much as gossip magazine try to emphasize “Stars go grocery shopping, JUST LIKE US!” they’re probably better off demonstrating that sentiment by, say, showing Ben Affleck do a Burger King commercial before he got famous.

Even the actors who seemingly broke out of nowhere had to put in their dues, and that American quality for hard work is something we support, even when we go out of our way to find the most embarrassing early career film choices of famous people in order to poke fun at them.

So let’s find the most embarrassing early career film choices of famous people in order to make fun of them.

The Most Hilarious Debut Film Appearances of Famous Actors

Okay, now that’s just kicking someone when they’re down.

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Posted in Strange America

Tagged Actors, America, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Benicio Del Toro, Film Debuts, Hercules, Hollywood, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kevin Costner, Liam Neeson, Movies, Patrick Swayze, Pee Wee Herman, Sylvester Stallone

The World’s Saddest Cuisines: Latvia

Posted on October 27, 2015 | 68 comments

“This is what you guys eat for dinner? Great, now I’m hungry AND sad.”

~Tourists in Latvia

America, in case you didn’t get the memo, is better than all the rest of you wannabe country motherfuckers out there. That’s just a basic truth, and if you disagree with it you’re either French or one of those jerkwads that writes those magazine articles about “happiness indexes.”

Why is America great? Our education and health care system? Okay, don’t be a sarcastic asshole, we’re asking a serious question here.

Well, many of you shouted all sorts of great things, like freedom, whiskey, and we’re pretty sure we heard someone shout “the world’s largest charcoal grill in Magnolia, Arkansas” which, um, that’s definitely unique but hey we’ll give it to you.

But if you ask us, of the many, many aspects of America we truly love, there’s one that tends to take a special place in our heart. Well, yes, booze, but we’re talking about something that has a special place in our heart because it’s physically lodged there.

That’s right, America’s tradition of culinary excellence. We make amazing food! Horrifically unhealthy, sure, but amazing nonetheless.

Which is what brings us to our latest series here at AFFotD. While America is clearly the pinnacle of the food world (sit down and shut up, France) there are other countries whose national cuisines, the food they grew up eating out of a sense of identity and history, are…well, pretty depressing.

So we’re going to take some time to tell you about countries who don’t just do food worse than us, they do food worse in us in a way that we don’t even want to make fun of them for it, we just feel kind of bad for the poor guys. Plus, we’re totally going to make fun of them.

The World’s Saddest Cuisines: Latvia

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Posted in Insulting Foreigners, Strange Foods, The Rest of Them, The World’s Saddest Cuisines

Tagged "milk products", America, beetroot soup, biešu zupa, bread soup, buckwheat, Cheese, grey peas (?), Griķi, Latvia, Latvian food, maizes zupa, Milk, peasants, potatoes, Russia, serfs, Sklandrausis, skābais krējums, The World’s Saddest Cuisines

Every Air Force One in American History

Posted on October 20, 2015 | 1 comment

“Get off my plane.”

~Indiana Jones

Outside of children who are big fans of those Planes movies, nowhere in American society is a single aircraft more iconic than Air Force One. When we fly our President around, we fly him in style, in a cutting-edge jet that can survive a direct blast from a nuclear bomb and is exclusively piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Okay, neither of those things are true, but Air Force One is so mythic that a decent handful of you absolutely took us for our word there.

Air Force One is an American icon, both over and underappreciated at the same time. So we decided to take a moment to sit you down (you are sitting, right?) and tell you about the history of our President’s super expensive charter jet. And since we’re feeling generous, we’ll just let you know about every Air Force One plane that has ever existed, partly because we like to be as thorough as we can when it comes to discussing presidential aircraft, but mainly because we want as many excuses to post scenes from the movie Air Force One on our site.

Every Air Force One in American History

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Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Our Greatest Presidents

Tagged Air Force, Air Force One, Airplanes, America, Bill Clinton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, FDR, George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Harry Truman, JFK, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon B Johnson, POTUS, Presidnt of the United States of America, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt

More of the Goofiest Baseball Player Names Of The 19th Century

Posted on October 15, 2015 | 2 comments

“Heh, guys, remember Dickie Flowers? AHHH HA HA HA.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt

A few weeks back, we posted an article where we dug around the annals of Major League Baseball lore for the all-important purpose of laughing at silly names. And ho boy, were there a lot of silly names to be found. So many in fact that we couldn’t stick with just a single article. Yes, there are more names that, either by a lack of parental foresight or the wanton cruelty of their teammates, are hilarious to our perpetually adolescent minds. Sure, a lot of them are nicknames, but this was during a time where a player’s nickname actually went on his box score. These people are remembered by as having these names, which we find delightful, because these names are goofy as shit.

More of the Goofiest Baseball Player Names Of The 19^th Century

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Posted in All things baseball, Athletes, Strange America

Tagged America, Baseball, Cannonball Titcomb, Goofy names, Major League Baseball, nicknames

The Goofiest Baseball Player Names Of The 19th Century

Posted on October 1, 2015 | 3 comments

“You can just call me Wild Bill. Holy shit, wait, you’re actually going to do that?”

~Wild Bill Widner

We’ve talked about early baseball, and especially baseball in the 19^th century, here before. Simply put, the 1800s were a lawless time in a lot of ways, and professional baseball was definitely included in that list. Hell, back then, foul balls didn’t count as strikes, in 1879 it took 9 balls to get a walk, and people wouldn’t even play with a glove so errors were almost more common than hits.

Now, these oddball rules were the result of a new sport coming into its own, which was a trying process for both owners and players. Teams and even Leagues folded overnight, and the salary a professional baseball player could hope for was about as high as you’d expect from someone placed in this tenuous position. So while the quality of play was, by modern comparison, pretty shitty, the 19^th century did have us beat in one very significant field.

The ridiculousness of their names and nicknames. Nowhere does baseball offer more accidental hilarity than with the names that players, who though underpaid were professional athletes, went by. These are names that fans chanted (or like, respectfully muttered to each other, we know that people wore fancy hats to baseball games back then so maybe it was a more refined affair at the time) and that are forever linked in the history books of the game as these people’s identities.

And there are some doozies of identities here. So no more backswallash (Is that a 19^th century word or did we just write gibberish?) let’s dive into some of these names.

The Goofiest Baseball Player Names Of The 19^th Century

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Posted in All things baseball, Athletes, Strange America

Tagged America, Baseball, Candy Cummings, Dickie Flowers, Goofy names, Ice Box Chamberlain, Lady Baldwin, Major League Baseball, MLB, Pussy Tebeau, Silly Names

Frederick Russell Burnham: America’s Scout

Posted on September 29, 2015 | 2 comments

“I’m not saying I can smell fear, but that’s just because I’m very modest.”

~Frederick Russell Burnham

The Boy Scouts of America have been around since 1910, and in that time they have made quite an impression on the nation. Some of you might associate Boy Scouts with your childhood, earning merit badges and going camping and learning how to like, tie knots? That’s a thing you did right? Others of you, like our staff, might also associate Boy Scouts with their childhood, only the focus is more on that one kid in your High School that really stuck with it, and while it was cool that he got to use a pocket knife and shit, he always wore knee-high socks with shorts and you know definitively that he did not get laid until he was well into his 20s. And still others of you might think of the Boy Scouts as an organization that is not particularly good at being nice to gay people.

But, something that almost no America thinks about in relation to the Boy Scouts are the men responsible for for the very idea of scouting itself. Scouting was first established in the United Kingdom by Robert Baden-Powell in 1907 as a way to support youth physical, mental and spiritual development. As you likely know, this goal was achieved through the focus on outdoor and survival skills, with the notion that a self-reliant child with a diverse skill set would be able to use what they learned through scouting and apply it to take constructive roles in society.

Now, “going outside” isn’t something that we really like doing much ourselves, and since we live in the age of the internet we don’t have to. But in the pre-internet age of the early 1900s when this all started, we imagine that going out and learning how to make fires and whittle sticks into shivs (we’re assuming that’s a thing Boy Scouts did) was probably both constructive and about as exciting of an activity as you could get. Either way, it’s an influential movement, and though it was started by a Brit, it was in fact inspired by an American man who basically taught Baden-Powell everything he knew. A tiny man with a powerful nose who you probably haven’t heard of, which is a right we’re going to wrong. Because there were few Americans as badass as…

Frederick Russell Burnham: America’s Scout

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Posted in American Heroes, Fighters

Tagged America, Boy Scouts, Dakota War, Esperanza Stone, Federick Russell Burnham, Frederick Burnham, hippopotamus scheme, Matabele War, Pleasant Valley War, Robert Baden-Powell, Scouts, Second Boer War, Second Matabele War, Shangani Patrol, South Africa, Tiburcio Vásquez, Wilson's Patrol

More of the Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors

Posted on September 23, 2015 | 2 comments

“Why are we still doing this?”

~AFFotD’s Candy Taste Testers

A few weeks ago, we talked about marshmallow Peeps. Specifically, the fact that marshmallow Peeps, which exist only to taste like sugar coated with more sugar, with the added benefit of being able to bite the head of a cute inanimate object, puzzlingly comes in a variety of flavors, most of which are horrible. The formula for the Peep is basic—pump enough sweetness into a marshmallow as you can without it technically becoming a hate crime, drop it in some children’s Easter baskets, and laugh as you watch their parents hopefully try to control them. Trying to make Peeps taste like anything else is just showing off.

Well actually, it’d be showing off if they were actually good at picking flavors. Which they are not. So, they’re showing off in the way you’re showing off if you try to do a backflip and land on your fucking neck. Anyway, here are some more mistakes made by the Just Born company, makers of marshmallow Peeps.

More of the Grossest Marshmallow Peeps Flavors