Little-known fact: Jon Hamm owns four eagles. They sit on separate perches in his backyard. Four species of eagle: golden, tawny, Spanish Imperial, and short-toed snake.

Previously unknown: Every morning, these eagles are fed, then rotated by a robed assistant whose sole duty is to judge which of these regal birds looks most like Jon Hamm on that particular day before placing said eagle on the left-most perch. The remaining eagles are also ranked by their resemblance that day, from left to right. This puts the eagle that looks the least like Jon Hamm on a given day in shadow once the sun goes behind Hamm's enormous seven-story garage. Amazingly, in the twelve years Hamm's lived here, the same eagle has sat in the shadows on consecutive days only three times. Incredible.

Incidentally, rumors that The Music Man was based on the early life of Jon Hamm are entirely untrue.

Partially true fact: Jon Hamm once taught high school English at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis, his alma mater. Reputedly, Hamm was known for reading-lists comprised exclusively of Ukrainian lit (leaning heavily on Prokhasko's The UnSimple and Volodymyr Drozd's Everything All Over Again) and for a grim insistence that students embrace a system of writing he developed called "think drafting," which was later adopted by both Otterbein and Bard.

Surely you already know this: After one year of teaching high school, Jon Hamm left his hometown. In a letter to this author, Hamm described the departure thusly:

I left St. Louis with $150 in my pocket and a wallet full of dangerously overdrawn credit cards. I drove out from St. Louis over the course of four or five days (staying on friends' couches in various western states, as well as on the side of the road in Carlin, Nevada) in a 1986 Toyota Corolla that would regularly blow a radiator-fan fuse and overheat.

What you may not know: This Corolla featured an incredible talking glove box that today is accepted as one of the world's fir...