Obviously I knew all of these facts and historic tidbits before reading them here, but I’m just so glad you all are sharing such wonderful nuggets of information about our nation’s founding with everyone else! Parents really should print this thread and give it to their children so they can know the REAL story of America’s early days.
-George Washington (nee Leon Shingledown) used crude oil as a salad dressing.
I think this one might be true. And, if it isn’t, it oughtta be!
George Washington lost his two front teeth at the post-Declaration signing party when (after several shots) he said “Hey everybody, watch this!” and put a firecracker in his mouth, then asked Thomas Jefferson to light it. (That’s how he ended up with wooden dentures.)
DJ Benny Frank, who was providing the music for the party, started the nation’s first dance craze when, after seeing Washington hopping around yelling in pain, mistook it for a new dance step and called out “Everybody do the Shingledown!”
Years later Ray Charles had a hit song inspired by this incident:
“Ah, everybody was juiced, you can bet your soul
They did the boogie-woogie, with a sturdy roll
They Shingledown
They doin’ the Shingledown
They doin’ the Shingledown,
Everybody doin’ the Shingledown”
After that, they went for more subtlety. If you take the first letter of each sentence in the 2nd draft, it spells out “Hey George: Bite us.”
After inventing bifocal glassess, Ben Franklin went on to invent quadrifocals. It served no purpose, but did inspire fellow inventing Founding Father Thomas Jefferson to create the first quadrophonic sound system.
King George III was determined to sail across the Atlantic to the colonies and personally lead the British troops, and to force any colonials who surrendered to swear an oath of direct fealty to him. It is rumored that the only thing that changed his mind was a secret Parlimentary ultimatum that threatened a Jacobite restoration.
Yes, 64% were Jewish. 73% were of the Negro races and 97.5% were homosexual and 117% were women disguising themselves as men so they wouldn’t be sent home.
The Mayflower travelers, or Puritans, invented Puritan Oil, which was originally the grease squeezed out of their hair, since bathing was against their religion. They used it for oil lamps and cooking.
William Brewster was the first beer maker in the New World. His daughter, Punky, inherited the brewery after his death and made a lot of money, now known as Brewster’s Millions.
Although many fanciful stories now abound regarding John Hancock’s signing of the Declaration of Independence, no such person actually existed. The “signature” was the work of one Alton Arberry, a barely literate cousin of Thomas Jefferson, who snuck into Jefferson’s study and attempted to deface the Declaration with a juvenile and poorly worded obscenity.
Some little know navel facts
John Paul Jones actually said “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way, because if the other guy is bigger or has more guns, I want to make sure I can get the fuck out of there.”
The last part is usually left off when quoting him
After the Revolutionary war was over JPJ went to work for Russia. The name Jones translated into Russian is Potemkin. The Russians named a battleship after him.
Everything you never knew about [del]Leon Shingledown[/del] George Washington:
And the original version of his other pithy quote was: “I have not yet begun to take flight.”
The truth about the major battle of Saratoga was it was really just a misunderstanding. British General John Burgoyne went to Saratoga for the races and there was a problem with the starting gate causing Burgoyne to lose a bet. Upon paying off he cursed the gates for costing him his wager. Rebel General Horatio Gates, at the next window overheard what he thought was a personal slur… and well you know the rest
Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown not because he was defeated, but rather because he was depressed after overhearing Washington say, after seeing the British army in its red uniforms marching in rows and playing drums: “How gay is that?”
Ben Franklin invented the Post Office so he could mail sketches of his penis to the wives of the Founding Fathers (aka the Founding Mothers).
The original name for the Founding Fathers was the Foundling Fathers, as there was a lot of hanky panky going on in the coat rooms at the Constitutional Congress, resulting in a plethora of bastards who thereafter have been known as “Congressmen”.
The original “Battle Hymn of the Republic” actually went like this -
“We fired our guns and the British kept a’comin.
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”
The only reason it wasn’t formally adopted was that no-one liked using the word “nigh”.
The United States was originally meant to be in Brazil. But somebody accidentally drew the map upside-down
Independence Day was originally supposed to be June 4, but Abigail Adams accidentally printed up 40,000 matchbooks that read “Freedom! July 4, 1776!” and it was decided not to make her feel bad.
A little known facht* is that the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party originally intended to steal the tea and sell it on the black market. But the wagons that were supposed to help carry away the loot never arrived, and so the tea had to be dumped.
I don’t think this is true. It is well documented that Ben Franklin established the Post Office so that he could be sure he didn’t miss a single issue of Playboy by having to find it on the newsstand.
He started mailing penis sketches years later.