New Party Trick

No, it's not a magic trick; I haven't learned a new one of those in quite some time. I'm talking about learning all the US Presidents in order of their presidency. So it's not exactly as cool as a magic trick, but it might turn a few nerdy heads. I was going through my job hunt today by looking over potential jobs I would be interested in applying for on MonsterTRAK.com, Idealist.org, and even Craigslist.com. I was doing that and looking over my resume and cover letters most of the day. It started getting kind of boring, so I decided to check my fantasy basketball team and the internet in general. Somehow, I found myself ok wikipedia and was reminded of a friend that knows all the presidents by their number. Sometimes, he would shout, "Give me a number!" If you said 20, he would say, "James A. Garfield, next." So I decided to stop working on the job search. I figured with Jeopardy coming up shortly anyway, why the heck not?

So I decided to take a look at a wikipedia article with a list of the presidents. I started by memorizing some of the more memorable presidents like #26 Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, himself. Of course you have #1 George Washington who started it all. At #35, the beloved Catholic, John F. Kennedy. #8 Martin Van Buren, popularized by Seinfeld. In the show, there is a gang called the Van Buren Boys. I'm still not quite there in terms of recalling the president's name when prompted with a number, but I'm still working on it. At this point, I can write down all the presidents in order. In order to get to the point where I can associate the name with the number, I need to be tested. So please feel free to test me randomly by giving me a number. I think I'm going to try to learn something new every couple of weeks, small projects on the scale of this one. If you have any suggestions on what I should learn, please share. If you feel weird about posting a comment, DON'T feel weird. I live for the comments. They fuel my desire to continue blogging; it lets me know I'm not just wasting my time with this blog. For example, I really appreciated the folks who posted a haiku as a comment in response to the Haiku post.


#8 Marty Van Buren