Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Sorry, guys

Right off the bat, I’m going to admit that this post is not about monkeys. Hail to the Chimp is just my favorite fake Simpsons movie, and I needed a vaguely presidential-sounding title for this post.

My buddy Nick, the Official Philadelphia Correspondent for Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, is a teacher, and today expressed to me a concern that he didn’t have the knowledge of our nation’s presidents befitting a professional who could be asked a random executive-related question by an inquisitive young mind at any time. Thus was born the Presidential Challenge. Basically, we both agreed to grab a piece of paper, number it 1 to 44, and try to put all of the U.S presidents in order. No time limit, but no cheating! It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

Eh? Eh?

You can view my list to the right. I scored a 33 out of 44 presidents. That’s 75 percent! I think that’s pretty good, but I feel like a made a series of unforgivable errors along the way that unnecessarily hampered my progress. Here they are, in ascending order of egregiousness.

1) I forgot Benjamin Harrison. This isn’t terrible in itself, since all of those Reconstruction-era presidents are pretty forgettable. However, comma, I feel like as an American, it’s the least I can do to be able to name all of the presidents.

2) I forgot John Quincy Adams. I remembered Andrew Jackson, but not his mortal nemesis. And you’ll notice that I forgot the grandson of a president, and the son of a president. I probably couldn’t tell you one of either of those guys’ policies, but I should have remembered them as answers to trivia questions.

3) I forgot Grover Cleveland. Born in Caldwell! New Jersey’s president! The only president elected to non-consecutive terms! How could I not remember! I was seriously considering not even posting my list, because I didn’t want the whole wide Internet world to know that I forgot that Grover Cleveland even existed. But I’m bigger than that, precious reader. You deserve to know.

And because I love you, here’s that chimp I promised.