Saturday Night Hootenanny

We got a special Hootenanny tonight. A single song once again.

Happy Birthday America.

And it is from the Japan, but what the heck.

IMAO Time Machine: Fun Facts About the 50 States: Oregon

This is a reposting of one of Harvey’s classics. There’s a link to the book in the sidebar. — The Editors


Welcome to Fun Facts About the 50 States, where – week by week – I’ll be taking you on a tour around this great nation of ours, providing you with interesting, yet completely useless and probably untrue, information about each of the 50 states.

This week, we’ll be desperately pleading with grandpa not to change his will before his physician-assisted suicide appointment because we’re headed to Oregon. So let’s get started…


  • Oregon became the 33rd state on February 14th, 1859. Historians speculate that this date was chosen by then-president James Buchanan so that Mrs. Buchanan wouldn’t notice that he neglected to get her a Valentine’s Day present. Bloodstains on the family rolling pin provide evidence that his plan failed.
  • The capital of Oregon is Salem, which has nothing to do with witch-burning, despite claims to the contrary by members of the Oregon chapter of Recovered Newts Anonymous.
  • The state flower of Oregon is the Oregon grape, whose fruit is said to rival that of the greatest French vineyards, even though Oregonian wine lacks the cowardly and annoying bouquet of its French competitors.
  • Oregon license plates come in a variety of colorful designs, but all contain the phrase “Where Old Hippies Come To Die.”
  • Oregon is nicknamed “The Beaver State.” For you city-folk, a beaver is a smelly, hairy, bucktoothed animal with a wide, flat tail. Sorta like a feminist, except less prone to rabid frothing.
  • Oregon has more ghost towns than any other state. However, please note that moving to one of them will NOT increase your chances of scoring with Patrick Swayze.
  • Which could be either a bug or a feature, depending on which way you swing.
  • Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge is considered by many to offer the world’s best windsurfing. Of course, those “many” are mostly people who think it’s funny to watch windsurfers crash into rocks.
  • Oregon’s Crater Lake is the deepest lake in America. The bottom reaches all the way to Hell, and will become the source of the eternally leaky roof used to torture Bob Vila after he dies.
  • Like New Jersey, Oregon has no self-serve gas stations. The idea is to provide jobs for folks who aren’t quite bright enough to master the phrase “fries with that?” and other people who vote Democrat.
  • The Coast Douglas Fir – at 329 feet – was the tallest tree in the state until it was cut down to make “Save the Spotted Owl” flyers for the Sierra Club.
  • Oregon’s state nut is the Hazelnut. Oregon is the only state with an official state nut, since Michigan’s Michael Moore is technically classified as a “lunatic.”
  • The town of Boring, Oregon, was named for its founder, W.H. Boring, and NOT because the town’s only TV station shows nothing but reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
  • The world’s largest sea-cave is located near Florence, Oregon, and is populated mostly by round-bellied sharks and shredded wetsuits.
  • Oregon’s Heceta Head Lighthouse is the most photographed lighthouse in the nation, due in large part to its scenic quaintness. At least according to its 36-24-36 nudist lighthouse keeper.
  • Eugene, Oregon is rated the best cycling community in the US by “Cycling Magazine.” It’s also the nation’s top consumer of “Lance Armstrong Brand Undetectable Injectable Testosterone.”
  • There are nine lighthouses still standing along the Oregon coastline. Five are still in use, the other four were sold as advertising space for Viagra.
  • The Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center contains the world’s largest collection of rosaries, although not quite enough to keep Ted Kennedy from going to Hell, where he’ll share a house with Bob Vila.
  • The Seaside Aquarium was the first to successfully breed harbor seals in captivity. They credit their success to cheap wine and Barry White CDs.
  • Salem’s capitol building is topped by a statue titled “Oregon Pioneer,” which features a drunken French-Canadian fur-trader in the midst of hollering “Where do you guys keep the beaver around here?”
  • The International Museum of Carousel Art in Hood River, Oregon contains the world’s largest collection of carousel horses and is known to the locals as the “Wooden Glue Factory.”
  • Every house in Bickelton, Oregon has a bluebird house built onto it. It’s as though Hitchcock filmed “The Birds” in Stepford.
  • The origins of Oregon’s name are shrouded in mystery, although the most popular theory is that it was derived from an incident during the Lewis & Clark expedition where they lost a canoe paddle on the Columbia river.
  • Which would also explain Oregon’s other nickname – “the bad pun state.”
  • Eugene, Oregon was the first city in the US to have one-way streets, effectively halving the number of times motorists get harassed by the same squeegee guy.
  • The state motto of Oregon is “Alis Volat Propriis” – Latin for “Canada’s THAT way, ya draft-dodging hippie.”
  • Oregon’s state fish is the Chinook Salmon, which is on the verge of extinction, since it’s not cute & fluffy enough for environmentalists to give a crap about.
  • Portland, Oregon, is home to the International Rose Test Garden, where researchers recently developed a Super Rose, beautiful enough to buy forgiveness for a 3 a.m. stumbling-drunk return from a strip club.
  • Tillamook is the site of Oregon’s largest cheese factory and, coincidentally, Oregon’s largest mouse-trap factory.
  • At 8,000 feet deep, Hell’s Canyon is the deepest river gorge in North America. A scale model of it can be seen by observing the trickle of sweat continuously running along the bottom of one of Michael Moore’s belly-folds.

That wraps up the Oregon edition of Fun Facts About the 50 States. Next week we’ll be suckered into paying $100 for a “genuine” piece of Ben Franklin’s kite as we visit Pennsylvania.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go out and buy me a Super Rose.


[The complete e-book version of “Fun Facts About the 50 States” is now available at Amazon.com. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download free Kindle apps for your web browser, smartphone, computer, or tablet from Amazon.com]

Kids Anxiously Await Tonight’s Hootenanny

Classic Sowell

Submitted by Slapout:

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Ah, The Good Ol’ Days

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Fun Fact: The Neil Armstrong of U.S.A.

On December 8, 1776, Thomas Paine (while serving with General Greene in the retreat from New York) arrived in Philadelphia. “In what I may call a passion of patriotism,” he remembered, he “wrote the first number of the Crisis.”

This was to be the first in a series of 18 essays collectively called “The American Crisis,” Paine’s major writing effort for the remainder of the war. They were printed at his own expense. He turned over all profits to the American cause.

“Crisis One” is familiar: it begins “These are the times that try men’s souls….” Some say that his invigorating words carried the day for Washington’s troops in Trenton on Christmas Day.

It was in “Crisis Two” that Paine wrote the phrase “The United States of America” for the first time in history. It quickly caught on.

–Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom

John Philip Sousa With Dogs

Now the man is doubly great in my book:

What They Were Fighting to Defend: Part 2 of 2

What They Were Fighting to Defend: Part 1 of 2

Song Parody: I’ve Lost That Covid Feeling

(by the Self-Righteous Brothers)

♩♩♪

You never touch your eyes any more, nor touch my lips
And there isn’t soap in the world enough to clean your fingertips
You’re trying hard not to spread it (baby)
But baby, baby forget it:

[Chorus]
I’ve lost that Covid feeling
Whoa, that Covid feeling
I’ve lost that Covid feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa

Now there’s no welcome look in your eyes when I reach for your mask
And now you’re starting to criticize little things I ask
It makes me feel just like the flu does (baby)
‘Cause, baby, you treat me like Judas

I’ve lost that Covid feeling
Whoa, that Covid feeling
I’ve lost that Covid feeling
Now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa

[Bridge]

Baby, baby, I get down on my knee and protest
That you should love me with no test, yeah
We had a love, a love, a love I don’t want rejected
So don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t treat me as infected
Baby (baby), baby (baby)
I beg of you, please, please
I need no gloves (I need no gloves)
I need no gloves (I need no gloves)
So bring last year back (So bring it on back)
Bring last year back (So bring it on back)

♩♩♪

Straight Line of the Day: Different This Year: Your Fourth of July Barbecue…

Straight Line of the Day: Different this year: your Fourth of July barbecue…

Welcome to IMAO: Please Keep the Fireworks To a Minimum, as All This Stuff Is Fairly Fragile. Thanks.

Also, we have a map of your vicinity.

Let’s Just Shed Some Spam . . . I Mean, Light.

How much can I earn per day? At least $ 15 000 a day.

May I just ask where the decimal point is?

Now I earn over € 13 261 a day
I was released two weeks ago.

Never mind.

Greetings from Ohio! I’m bored to tears at work so I decided to browse your blog on my iphone during lunch break. I love the information you present here and can’t wait to take a look when I get home. I’m shocked at how fast your blog loaded on my cell phone .. I’m not even using WIFI, just 3G .. Anyhow, good site!|

I’m shocked at how you’re from Ohio. And how bored you are. Anything different when you got home?

I have discovered some new things from your site about personal computers. Another thing I’ve always presumed is that laptop computers have become a specific thing that each family must have for most reasons. They supply you with convenient ways in which to organize homes, pay bills, shop, study, tune in to music and even watch tv series.

You are a quick study.

An even greater concern for GC Reform members is that the children of H1 B visa holders, Those on the H 4 primarily based visas, Will have to leave the country or become undocumented when they age out of the program at 21. The group rates that about 40,000 children are at risk of aging out of the program and losing their status within the nation. citizen, His lack of citizenship limits her potential. to illustrate, She like to start her own home based business centered around healthy food options for public school kids in five years. She says that she would like to be an astronaut, she’d like to be a scientist,

Immigration has not only been important to the prosperity of Microsoft and other individual tech companies, But in the world leadership position of the entire American tech sector. Smith has written.

… Smith let it be done.

Sounds like every Washington Post and New York Times story ever written.

Independence Day, 2020

On the 244th birthday of our country, this is a good time to re-read this document:

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn

South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts:
John Hancock

Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross

Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris

New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple

Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery

Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

You know what? We shouldn’t limit our reading — or understanding — of this document for anniversaries such as today.