Since [his Revolutionary victory], genealogists have been pondering the possibilities had President Washington been a bit more power-hungry. As early as 1908, newspapers published accounts of history buffs who worked their way through the Washington family tree using rules of succession to determine the rightful heir to the theoretical American throne. [...]
[Ancestry.com's Megan Smolenyak] concluded that leadership would have passed not to men named Abraham or Teddy but to those named Lee, Felix or Frank. "We would have had a King named Spot, how cool is that?" Smolenyak muses of the son who would've fallen between King Bushrod, the first, and Bushrod II.
—Newsweek.com, The Man Who Would Be King, 08 Oct 2008
History knows Preston Treacher Knoist as the last Knoist Brother. The three Knoists hunted for themselves the first rabbit they learned to make vanish. The lame Knoist chased it. The blind one caught it. The naked one put it in his pocket.
After delighting audiences to sold-out shows for over a generation, the Knoist Brothers Circus folded in the final days of the American Civil War. The other two Knoists, the strongman, and a plumber were killed by Hermes, The World's Mightiest Snail. Survivors did not ask for their money back.
In 1899, Preston T. Knoist was found clenched to the inactive boiler of Chicago's abandoned Liberty Paints factory, penniless and dead. Many scientific and cultural movements that lived and died in the 20th Century were named with words and phrases coined in the fevered scribblings he left behind, like pasteurization, communism, and Howard Cosell.
Our story is about a boy with no friends who talks like what he says is always new and of interest to you, no matter how strange or boring. The boy finds a runaway circus dog. The dog then wins a radio call-in contest to be the King of the World. As pilgrims to a larger world, our protagonists must learn to survive the antics and infamy to ensue.
It's a snappy, witty fairy-tale kind of thing...
—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
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