How Did the Los Angeles Dodgers Get Their Name? Back in the day, it was common to see teams across all sports moving from city to city, like that was their sole purpose. And for many teams, their names don’t make any sense upon moving to a new city. The Los Angeles Lakers? The Utah Jazz?! In baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers obviously didn’t start in California. The team began in New York as the Brooklyn Dodgers for 68 seasons, moving to the West Coast in 1958. Like the Yankees or Red Sox, “Dodgers” is such a great name, synonymous…
Author: Steve DiMatteo
Steve DiMatteo
Steve is the editor of America Is Weird and finds just about everything in the United States to be extremely strange. He's written for the Associated Press, MLB.com, Sports on Earth (RIP), and many other publications over the course of his career.
You might not be in the market for anymore bleak news, and this might already be common knowledge to you if you have a new car, but Americans are paying a lot for their vehicles right now. The average car payment climbed to $717 a month in the fourth quarter of 2022, a record high and up 50% from 2010. Back in the summer, car payments had just crossed $700 for the first time ever. Even more terrifying is that nearly 16% of car buyers agreed to monthly payments reaching at least $1,000, which is up from 10.5% in the…
Pretty much every American is familiar with the infamous leg lamp from the movie A Christmas Story, thanks in large part to the 24-hour TBS marathons every December. You might even know that the Christmas Story house is alive and well in Cleveland, Ohio, where the exteriors of the film were shot. You can even go inside the house, which now functions as a museum for the movie and a replica of Ralphie’s home. What you might not know is that Chickasha, Oklahoma is, according to legend, home to the inspiration behind the beloved leg lamp from the movie. Apparently,…
The Pizza Hut buffet is now a relic of the past, a symbol of a more utopian time in our history where you could go to your local Pizza Hut and see before you a seemingly limitless number of options. The world then seemed to make so much more sense. Adorned between the bottomless serving trays of pizza and salad was a copious amount of decorative kale. So much so that Pizza Hut was once one of the largest kale buyers in the entire United States. The thing is, nobody was actually eating the kale at Pizza Hut – it…
Netflix is desperately trying to find new revenue, and in 2023, the streaming service will start cracking down on the long-standing tradition of password sharing. How they’re going to do that is anyone’s guess, but some form of this measure is on the way. Since the dawn of time, heroes out there have been paying for Netflix and allowing untold numbers of people to share access and watch millions of movies and TV shows for free. Boyfriends and girlfriends (and ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends), siblings, parents, roommates, random people you met once and drunkenly gave your login credentials to – it’s…
Did you know the tenth-largest pyramid in the world is located in… Memphis, Tennessee? There are few things that scream being American more than the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s right – the tenth-largest pyramid in the world is right here in the United States and is the current home of a Bass Pro Shops sporting goods store. That sentence just feels so… right. Also known simply as the Memphis Pyramid, and formerly the Great American Pyramid, it’s very fitting this complex has evolved into such a beacon of capitalism. While it is of course a Bass…
You probably saw this one coming. But after two years of absolute brawling over COVID vaccine mandates, the battle over vaccines has come to the doorstep of schools around the country. Thanks to the misguided parents’ rights advocates out there and their simple fear-mongering messaging tactic, a not-insignificant 35 percent of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation now believe they should have the right to choose whether or not their kids get the vaccines that prevent against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella. As you might expect, there is a huge divide among political party lines. In the…
You’d be forgiven (pun of course intended) for not realizing there is an NBA team that performs a pregame prayer for the entire freaking arena. I had no idea of it myself until I saw this tweet from Jason Gallagher: It’s strange enough that we perform the national anthem ahead of sporting events. But to include a full-on invocation in the arena before even the anthem or player intros? Why? Why do such a thing at an NBA game? The Thunder franchise is, of course, a private entity that can do whatever it wants. A team could open every game…
Why exactly is eggnog seasonal? Let’s find out. I’m just going to be upfront and honest with you – I am an eggnog zealot. Once the holidays come around, I’m slurping down this bizarre, creamy concoction for about a month straight, adding all sorts of things to it like a mad scientist. Cinnamon sticks? Let’s go. Bourbon, maybe some scotch? You bet. Does adding chocolate of some kind to the drink make sense? Peppermint?! I have no idea, but I’m probably going to give it a try now. But as Homer Simpson once said, “We only get 30 sweet, noggy…
The US has never recorded this many positive flu tests in one week. That’s a pretty alarming statement, but it’s true – the flu is on a mission this year. In the United States, the bulk of flu season lasts from December through February, but things have ramped up so early, it’s unlike any flu season we’ve seen before. In the week ending November 26, the country reported more than 34,000 positive flu tests, which is the most on record dating back to 1997. To be fair, part of the rise in cases is due to the fact that we…