All the presidents, in order

In high school I earned myself a Varsity Letter in Academic Team, which is nothing like Academic Decathlon but more like Quizbowl, or Jeopardy! in teams (I like typing Jeopardy! with the exclamation point because it is completely ridiculous, but somehow Yahoo! with the exclamation point makes me angry; not sure what the difference is, but it does), and is generally grounds for a serious ass-kicking, trash-canning, wet-willying, or swirly-ing.

So Academic Team works thusly: Each of 2 teams has 5 players, so a total of 10 people sit on the stage, each with a buzzer that looks like the sort of buttons that one might push to release a nuclear missile, or initiate lockdown on a submarine. Questions are asked by a moderator, and any one player on the team can buzz in and answer the question, but you don't get to talk to your teammates. If you get the question right, then your team gets a bonus question and you are given something like 30 seconds to confer before answering. My team was top notch and made it to finals almost every year, but I was not the best player on the team, which had a total of 10 players so there was a definite delineation between 'first string' and 'second string' players. The second string players only got to play when we were up against a team with a reputation for completely sucking it up, and as soon as our team got behind, second strings were immediately pulled and replaced with first strings. I was probably 5th or 6th best on the team, which meant that sometimes I was first string and sometimes I was second string.

To give myself an edge, I thought it would be helpful to memorize the names of all the US presidents, in order. What's amazing about this is not the simple act of memorization, which is relatively trivial, but that I did so by creating the world's most phenomenally bizarre mnemonic device. It is substantially more amazing that to this day I can recall from memory the mnemonic device than that I remember the presidents in order. So I'm going to share it with you. The first letter of each word corresponds with the first letter of the name of a president. So without further ado:

While Adam just made muffins and John violated his teacher's pet turkey, Fred pierced Bob's lobes. Julie got high giving Arthur crazy haircuts. Chris made red turnips with hot cookies, having read Tommy's essay. Kevin jumped not far carrying really big cheese.

I have since updated the last sentence: "Kevin jumped not far carrying really big cheese balls." I think it is appropriate that our current president is "balls," but that may have to change depending on who is elected this November.