Eye of the Storm

You may! Have you heard of Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts? Today You Learned about an odd feature on it.

This is a historic building in Boston from all the way back in 1742! It's got a long, complicated history, where it was burned down, rebuilt, used as a meeting and marketplace, and all of that jazz.

Also it has this weathervane:

That is indeed a golden grasshopper! And do you know why it has a grasshopper weathervane? It's because... uh... well, actually, no one knows for sure why it has one. There are competing stories, though. one is that it's a copy of the one on the London Exchange, so it was put here as a way to mark/encourage the location to be a place of commerce. There are a couple of other stories along the lines of 'Uh, the architect liked grasshoppers as a kid!" or "He ran into a kid chasing grasshoppers while brainstorming!"

Ultimately, no one knows. There is actually a time capsule in the grasshopper too.

Also, someone stole it in 1974? And the detective on the case who got it back was Paul Revere Carroll, a man who is, in fact, the actual descendant of Paul Revere???

Wild.

I hope so. Let me dig around in my Fun Fact trunk...

...hm. How about this--Today You Learned about this fun little graffiti in Edinburgh Castle?

See, in the 1700s, Edinburgh Castle in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, was used by Great Britain to hold prisoners of war. This included French and Spanish prisoners, as well as pirates or privateers. And interestingly! This also included members of the fledgling American Navy, who the government considered pirates, as the British didn't recognize the US as a foreign country.

One of them left a fun little bit of art carved on a door:

That is one of the earliest depictions of the American flag (at least, the earlier version of it from the time) made in a place outside of the US itself.

Which is really cool? The country hadn't won the war yet, but this guy was so invested, and the flag was at that point so much a part of his mind as part of the American cause, that he thought it was worth carving on a wall while he was in prison an ocean away.