all the presidents (men)
I was-well, really-trying to bore myself to sleep the other night by seeing how many of the US presidents I could remember. Fewer than 20, reliably, as it turned out. The whole thing went like this:
Obama, Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter…wait, uh. Spiro Agnew wasn’t ever actually president, who was it in there…well. nevermind, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, then, uh, Eisenhower probably, Truman, FDR for sure…H…Hoover? No, he was the FBI guy… WILSON DEFINITELY WE GOT WILSON YEAH uh…Teddy Roosevelt…
…GRANT AND LINCOLN FOR SURE but no who are we kidding the 19th century’s basically just a big blank maybe if I come at it from the other end: Washington Jefferson Adams the other Adams uh Hamilton? No, he was never President, thank you Lin-Manuel Miranda for that knowledge I really gotta listen to your musical, um Johnson maybe? The one who was a real son of a bitch? (Jackson, it turns out.)
Nope, nope, can’t think of anybody else, there was that guy after Lincoln who died really fast (Garfield, except it turned out I was actually thinking of William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia after 32 days in office and who preceded Lincoln by Some Time) and there was somebody right after Lincoln who wasn’t Kennedy, Kennedy was his secretary and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, I wonder if any of that’s true, it could have been another Johnson maybe, it was some kind of really common name like that…
Anyway, I went to sleep. :)
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)