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I swear like a mom with a red-wine hangover walking barefoot through a field of LEGO. Have you stepped on that shit? Fucking hurts. A patent for the design was filed in Denmark on January 28, 1958, and the same sole-destroying interlocking pattern is in use today.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 28, 1958--
Let’s do something different. Instead of a traditional explanation of the history of the company, I want to just bullet point cool LEGO facts.
· Largest. Motherfucking. Toy company. In the world. You think you need flashing lights and noise and video graphics and whateverthefuck to make a sale? LEGO is colored fucking plastic that locks together, and it sells like a motherfucker. It sells like a motherfucker because you can build cool shit, and we do enjoy being creative.
· The company was making its product for nine years before it applied for that patent. As of writing we’re approaching the 75th anniversary of LEGO.
· Somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 billion pieces of LEGO have been manufactured. That’s double the high-end assessment of how many stars there are in the Milky Way galaxy.
· You know why the fuckers always fit together unless your pyromaniac douchebag older brother decided to melt some of the pieces with his lighter? It’s because the molds for making LEGO are accurate to within two-thousandths of a millimeter. On average, a mere 18 of every million bricks produced fails quality control. The company’s motto is “only the best is good enough.”
· During the holidays 28 LEGO sets are sold every second.
· The tallest LEGO tower made reached a hundred feet high and contained 465,000 bricks.
· We made the Taj Mahal LEGO one Christmas and it had almost 6,000 pieces. My wife did most of it.
· The founder was Danish carpenter Ole Kristiansen. He began the company in 1934 using the name Lego. Initially, the pieces were made of wood. He died a few months after the design patent was filed and his son took over.
· The Lego Movie came out in 2014. Made for approximately $60 million, it took in almost half a billion at the box office. The film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
· There are theme parks and books and video and board games. In addition to four feature films there are a shit ton of direct-to-video movies and shorts and TV shows. Based on a piece of fucking plastic with a cool design. Wow.
· There is even a short film titled Monty Python and the Holy Grail in LEGO.
· I googled “slutty lego costume” and while there is an attractive woman wearing a LEGO costume, I don’t think it qualifies as slutty. Nothing wrong with slutty. No slut shaming here. I think there should be a slutty LEGO costume. Someone get on that.
· In 2015 LEGO surpassed Ferrari as the most powerful brand in the world.
· “Legos” is not a word, says the company. The plural is LEGO, or LEGO bricks.
In conclusion, LEGO is way fucking cool except when you step on it.
I didn’t want to interrupt my bullet points with a daily sales pitch so I’ll just say that kids love my sweary fucking history book so if you got them LEGO over the holidays that’s awesome but for their birthday buy them my fucking book also please become a paying subscriber:
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.