“More like Machu…PEE-chew. Yeah. Shut up, it’s funny.”
~Hiram Bingham III
Whats the most American academic pursuit? When that question was posed to our AFFotD staff, we had a bevy of responses. “Business and greed!” Michael Douglass offered. “Law, like in my current film, The Lincoln Lawyer,” Matthew McConaughey said before we kicked him out of the offices and asked security what the hell he was doing there. “Titties!” Johnny Knoxville shouted before stapling a dollar bill to his forehead while we all laughed and nodded approvingly.
The actual answer to this question came as a shock to many. “Anthropology,” resident helicopter pilot/alien hunter Harrison Ford said from the back of the room. We all looked back at him, and there’s a distinctive mumble. “What the hell is that?” someone asks. “Gayyyyy,” the guy whose job is to say “gayyy” after everything he doesn’t agree with said (we hired him back in 1998… it was a…well, a different time back then). At that point, Ford took out his hat and whip, and we all went, “ohhhhh, the Indiana Jones profession. Yeah, good answer, good answer.” Like it was fucking Family Feud.
It was at this point that we took out a book on a man who was a real life Indiana Jones, or at least the Anthropologist who discovered the shit out of a mysteriously dead civilization. We won’t even hold it against him that he was born in Hawaii. That man was Hiram Bingham III.
America Fun Fact of the Day 