Ever wonder where you came from? Unless you're a pure 100-percent pedigree Italian, Russian, Chinese etc., having moved to this neck of the woods recently, chances are you're a mixed breed of various cultures. America is often referred to as the melting pot but at this point I think we're all a bunch of waxy candles some of whom are lit most of the time. Well, for years I've been threatening to look up my genealogy and apparently some of my ancestors were lit most of the time too. I turned up quite a bit of (likely apocryphal) information of my native ancestry and, allegedly, my great-great grandmother was a Misogi Apache. She was a slave that was owned, I also discovered, by President Zachary Taylor, our 12th president, and she was his mistress. I'm not crazy about poor grandma being a slave and a mistress, but I must admit, at least she went big time with a president and probably got some good perks from it all. I was rather proud of this presidential pedigree, at least until I delved into the life of Zachary Taylor and came up with some unbelievable facts.

Apparently Zachary's election to the highest office in the land was, naturally, a fluke. In an effort to make something of himself and earn the respect of his friends, he half-heartedly declared his candidacy for president in the 1848 election. This was treated as a joke among his acquaintances, who suggested the campaign slogan, "A muskrat in every pot." The story of how he acquired the peculiar nickname "muskrat head" has been lost, but we do know it has plagued him since birth and his hatred of it increased over the years, the mere mention of the word muskrat sent him into a rage. His opponent, Samuel Gates, was an enormously popular Governor who was running unopposed and considered a shoe-in. Polls taken two weeks prior to the election projected that the vote would go to Gates. Poor Zachary, who pretty much liked to dip into grandpa's cough medicine several times a day, didn't stand a chance. So Gates was all set to win. Unfortunately in a rather bizarre incident the man was accidentally ground to a pulp in a wheat-threshing machine at a campaign stop on the eve of the election. Imagine that — made into chop meat the day before you're supposed to be elected president. Taylor won, unopposed, of course. Guess they couldn't find another body to put up against my nutty grandpa.

Notoriously prone to drunken laziness Taylor held office for half a day when he gorged himself on fourteen pounds of French pastries and jugs of Indian corn whiskey and then fell asleep face-down in the White House Rose Garden for 86 hours. Upon awakening, he attempted his first official presidential act: the introduction of a bill requiring all visitors to the White House to do the Mexican Hat Dance with his 700 pound sister Rebecca while he, munching on his trademark sack of chocolate donuts, watched. Good Lord! I can only shake my head. Congress responded with zero "yea" votes and a rather stormy relationship between the two parties began.

A favorite prank of the senators would be not to show up to the presidential addresses but rather place muskrats, decked out in powdered wigs, in their own seats instead. Since being ridiculed from the first few days of his presidency, Taylor really snow balled out of control and had monumental jealous fits of his 11 predecessors, all of whom he was unfavorably compared to. He especially seemed to have a special hatred of George Washington (whom he referred to as "that bark-toothed Whig Sissy") and he spent much of his time trying to "one-up" the first president's celebrated accomplishments. Few Americans were amused, however, when he ordered every cherry tree east of the Mississippi to be burned to a stump, and then hurled all seventy place settings of the Presidential silverware (paid for with a staggering $56K of taxpayer money) across the Potomac River. When asked by his disbelieving father whether he was the one responsible for these acts, Taylor responded, "What do you care, *&%$# head? You'll be dead soon anyway." His papa was probably concerned about him hocking everything too because had he not disposed of the silver this way, he surely would have lost it gambling. Within a few days of taking office, to pay off poker debts, he surrendered ten priceless paintings, a bedspread given to John Quincy Adams by the King of Spain, and most of the linen. I believe it was sometime after that he spent a great deal of money on liquor, got completely soused, and fell out of the window in the oval office and was found passed out in the bushes the next morning. For some reason it really doesn't surprise me I am a descendent of this person. Being born on April Fool's day myself and having a rather unbelievable life that could rival a soap opera it seems to make sense. I can only shrug.

So that's my legacy. A cantankerous drunken man winning office by default, knocking up his native American slave woman, angering most of the country and swindling anything of value out of the white house to fuel his gambling habit. Had he not died after two years in office there probably would have been just the toilet and a few scraps of paper left. The biggest kicker of all is that there was a mix-up at the cemetery and his grave was given the wrong tombstone — one belonging to a Belgian flintlock. His family name? Mouskrat, French for "muskrat."

It's the truth, I swear!