The Daily Feather — Potty-Mouth Poll
We’re often asked if “top ideas” for Feathers are outsourced. Truth is, we’re quirky at QI and home grow them all. That’s not to say we don’t enjoy great research hubs like HistoryFacts.com, which a client shared with us last week. In two words, it’s catnip. To take but one example, did you know that the United States’ third President, Thomas Jefferson had bear cubs as pets? The nation’s 30th, Calvin Coolidge, kept a raccoon in the White House. Can you imagine? And then there was Andrew Jackson, who not only served as the 7th president but also, we learned posthumously, had quite the potty mouth. This knowledge was revealed in Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History, by Samuel G. Heiskell. According to the right Reverend William Menefee Norment, at Jackson’s 1845 funeral in Nashville, Poll, the president’s gray parrot, “…got excited and commenced swearing so loud and long as to disturb the people and had to be carried from the house.” Sadly, for profanity enthusiasts, the exact words are lost to history. All we know is Poll, “let loose perfect gusts of ‘cuss words,’” causing some to be “horrified and awed at the bird’s lack of reverence.”
On Friday morning, there were curse words flying at QI. We weren’t alone. Plotted on a distribution curve of distribution curves, Zerohedge, the National Enquirer of financial media, took pleasure in sharing this: The odds of all economists surveyed missing by such a wide margin their nonfarm payrolls forecasts three straight months was statistically impossible.
At the opposite end of the profanity spectrum, we’re downright giddy that after a brief spurt driven by gasoline, the resumed decline in shelter prices has brought Truflation back under the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, to 1.8% year-over-year (red line, YoY).