AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CLXXXIV

1. When he was 13 years old during the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson joined the local militia as a courier and messenger. He and his brother Robert were captured by the British in 1781, making him the only US president to have been a prisoner of war.

2. The Empire State Building was completed in just one year and forty-five days, between 1930-1931, during the Great Depression.  Crews put up the steel skeleton at a rate of four and a half stories every week. At 1,454 feet, it stood as the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years and remains an iconic symbol of New York City and architectural elegance. The building's 19,000 tons of exterior limestone were mined from the Empire Quarry in southern Indiana.

3. A league is an old unit of distance measure equal to 3 miles on land (4.8 km) or 3 nautical miles (5.6 km). It is traditionally based on how far a man could walk in one hour.

4. Tang is a powdered orange drink mix created by General Foods in 1957 and released for consumers in 1959. NASA used the stuff during the 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 flight with John Glenn to make onboard water taste better. General Foods then used the flight in heavy marketing, creating the false belief that NASA invented it, and making Tang synonymous with "The Space Drink". 

5. Got an extra 80 million dollars? You can buy a Gulfstream g650 - an ultra long-range, high speed business jet. Produced by the American company Gulfstream Aerospace, it has a top speed of 611 mph, a range of 7,000 nautical miles, and can hold 11-19 passengers. A little short of cash? A pre-owned g650 goes for between 33 - 65 million, and you can charter one for only $13,000 - 19,000 per hour. Or maybe you can borrow Mark Zuckerberg's.

6. Roanoke Island is a small island in the Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. It became famous as the site of England's first, failed  attempts to establish a permanent settlement in North America in the 1580s - famously resulting in the mystery of the "Lost Colony." 

7. The "dirtiest" song of the 1960's in the public imagination was the Kingsmen's 1963 rock version of "Louie Louie". Teens convinced themselves that the mumbled, slurred, unintelligible lyrics contained explicit, filthy descriptions of a sailor's sexual encounter. Parents panicked, radio stations banned it, and the FBI launched an obscenity investigation. In 1985, a publicity stunt by a local radio station spiraled into a state-wide phenomenon that almost got the state song of Washington changed to "Louie Louie". To this day, "Louie Louie" is played in the 7th inning stretch of all Seattle Mariners' baseball games.