Beguiler Tracts and Tyler Facts

Originally posted on March 12, 2006. Edited by Vin Diesel. He can conjugate the verb "to kill" in 349,233,890,147 ways and 7,694,001 languages.

Man, I do love being right.

First of all, let me tell you about how I tend to be ahead of the trends, but just barely. My existence has been marked with me being a fan of something right on the crux of when it starts to become very popular. Nalgenes, for example. I got one back when you could only get them at MEC and other stores with mountain climbing gear. I tend to get interested in something just before it hits its exponential growth rate.

Another might be Jack Johnson. Once again, I picked him up a few months after I got into Ben Harper. About a year later they start playing him regularily on radio stations, with his single from Curious George (which I picked up the release day) recently getting a ton of radioplay on multiple stations. A few months after I got mine people could pick them up at regular stores such as Sportchek and the like. The nice thing about being perpetually in this stage is that I find myself able to be ahead of the masses, but not so far ahead that I become terribly snobbish about it.

Anyways, this is yet another example. Recently Norrismania has hit the web. People are obsessed with everything Chuck Norris. Last week I had a friend quote some Chuck Norris "facts" (I will no longer quote the word facts, you can just assume the quotations. Perhaps by making those quoting hand gestures every time you read it... no not that hand gesture.) I immediately recognized them.

You see, I had been linked to a website several years ago which listed many Vin Diesel facts. I thought they were hilarious. Anyways, several years later, and this has popped up again. Only, due to Norrismania, everyone is focussing on the Norris facts, which are for the most part copies of the Vin Diesel facts, with Diesel replaced with Norris. You can see that facts about both exist, and this is the original site, despite the many others that exist.

Now, when this was quoted to me by my coworker, and I found other links to it as well, complete focus has been on The Chuck. However, I want to lay this to rest by saying that Vin Diesel was the first. No, I wasn't ahead of the curve in the Norrismania. I could care less about him or Vin Diesel. I came for the humour, I stayed for the... more humour.

However, it urked me that people were quoting without knowing the origins. So, I made it my goal to tell them. And, then I thought I ought find some proof, so that it wasn't just me mistaking the fact that the home site to this fact phenomenon didn't have both Diesel and Norris (as well as Mr. T) as it does now and I simply didn't notice and only had the Diesel site in my internet repetoire. So, I did some searching. Eventually, after Wikipedia gave me slightly more encouragement to find a real source, I found this article from Brown University which is reputable enough to back up my claim. Huzzah.

Anyways, this was really just the intro to what I really want to do. Originally, when first visiting the Vin Diesel fact site, I wanted to put in my own, which they encourage, picking the best. Ultimately I decided against it because I didn't really want to give away my intellectual property like that. In many situations I don't particularily care, but in this case my submissions were funny enough that I didn't want them to be stuck in a random conglomeration of facts written by Joe Nobody. So, I didn't submit them, and didn't save them, and they are now gone to the recesses of my memory.

However, now with this resurgence, I have a renewed passion for wanting to write these. However, they already have enough facts for those three tough guys, so I needed to make up my own figure to raise into mythology. I chose none other than the King of Postmodernism... Tyler Durden. He both satiates the tough guy image as well as the mythological factors. And thus we have:

Random Facts about Tyler Durden.

• When translated into binary, Tyler Durden's name has all numbers from 0-9, three letters and several other characters that are unknown to humanity.


• Tyler Durden once spent three years in a Russian gulash. Yes, a gulash.


• When a contestant on an early episode of Jeopardy, Tyler Durden was asked a trivia question and subsequently beat the crap out of the host while yelling "I'll ask the questions around here." To this day contestants must answer in the form of a question.


• Lord of the Rings was actually based on the life of Tyler Durden. The "fellowship of the ring" was his right hand, and the "eye of Sauron" was Attila the Hun's eye. The rest was filler put in by Tolkien. To this day no one knows the details of the actual conflict.


• The Idomo guy didn't grow his beard, his chin was sheltering itself for fear of the possibility it might someday be in the presence of Tyler Durden.

That'll do for now. I hope to keep these facts a-flowing, though I will not promise anything. I'm just hoping that they can fill those gaps during which I have little to write about or am just too busy to post something of decent length. And hopefully it will amuse. Also, any similarity to one of the facts on the site is either coincidence or due to the subconcious recollection.