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"TIL that Michael Jackson removed "Dirty Diana" from his concert setlist in London for Princess Diana to be respectful, but she asked for him to keep it in the setlist as it was one of her personal favorites." | todayilearned |
"TIL Nikola Tesla once spent over $2,000 on an injured white pigeon. The amount includes building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal. "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life," he said of her." | todayilearned |
"TIL Theodore Roosevelt's 1880 undergraduate thesis at Harvard was titled: "The Practicability of Equalizing Men and Women before the Law" which argued for women's rights, including property ownership, and argued that women ought to keep their birth names upon marrying." | todayilearned |
"TIL a Chinese father hired a 'hitman' to kill his son's character in online games so that he would stop playing games and get himself a job." | todayilearned |
"TIL car trunks got emergency release handles because a middle aged woman and her husband escaped being kidnapped and fought for it until it became a requirement" | todayilearned |
"TIL Queen Elizabeth II specifically asked to be in a James Bond skit with Daniel Craig for the Olympics, breaking royal protocol. When asked if she would like to say something she said, "Of course I must say something. After all, he is coming to rescue me."" | todayilearned |
"TIL that Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack are widely credited with helping end segregation in Las Vegas, by refusing to perform in venues that wouldn't allow blacks." | todayilearned |
"TIL Freddie Mercury spent his last months recording as many vocals as he could for the rest of Queen to finish after his death" | todayilearned |
"TIL Phyllis from "The Office" would pay bills and do Christmas shopping online from the office computers in the background." | todayilearned |
"TIL Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, has finally visited it, as his ashes are aboard the New Horizons spacecraft that completed a Pluto flyby in 2015." | todayilearned |
"TIL about Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy that solved his own murder case. He was poisoned with a cup of tea in a London hotel. Working with Scotland Yard detectives, as he lay dying, he traced the lethal substance to a former comrade in the Russian secret service" | todayilearned |
"TIL the IRS still operates largely on mainframe computers running 60 year old code" | todayilearned |
"TIL that during the Holocaust, Polish doctors Eugene Lazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz saved 8,000 Jews by creating a fake Typhus epidemic. The Germans quarantined the area instead of risking outbreaks by sending them to concentration camps." | todayilearned |
"TIL Stephen Hawking liked "The Theory Of Everything" so much that he allowed the filmmakers to use his trademarked computerized voice on it. He called the film "broadly true" and emailed the filmmakers that there were certain points when he thought he was watching himself, which left him tearful." | todayilearned |
"TIL in the 50-plus year history of the Japanese bullet train system, carrying over 5.3 billion passengers, there has been not a single passenger fatality or injury due to train accidents." | todayilearned |
"TIL that after her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended class and took notes for both of them, typed her husband's dictated papers and cared for their daughter and her sick husband—all while making the Harvard Law Review." | todayilearned |
"TIL that when the CEO of discount supermarket chain ALDI was kidnapped, he haggled about his ransom money and claimed the sum as a tax-deductable business expense in court after his release" | todayilearned |
"TIL about the Great Green Wall, an effort to plant trees to stop desertification in the Sahara that began in 2007. Ethiopia has planted over 5.5 billion seedling since." | todayilearned |
"TIL the USSR expected to win the final of the 1957 Ice Hockey World Championships, held in Moscow, but lost to Sweden. The organizers did not have the Swedish national anthem ready for the medal ceremony, so the Swedish players sang a drinking song and it was broadcast over the PA system." | todayilearned |
"TIL author H.P. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from his earnings as an author. His book "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", written one year before his death, sold a meagre 200 copies. He died in poverty at age 46." | todayilearned |
"TIL Classical Greece wasn't filled with pure white marble everything. The statues and ruins we see today were actually painted in all kinds of vivid colors that were just stripped bare back to their original white marble by time." | todayilearned |
"TIL That when Bill Paxton died, hundreds of storm chasers spelt out his initials BP across three states using GPS markers to honor him for his role as a storm chaser in the 90s movie Twister." | todayilearned |
"TIL A theme park in France employ ravens to clear the park off cigarette butts in return for a reward (bird food)." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" was not intended to be released as a single. They were later convinced to do so by Michael Jackson who had attended a Queen concert in Los Angeles and suggested it to Freddie Mercury backstage." | todayilearned |
"TIL that J.K. Rowling wrote a real person into The Goblet of Fire. The girl was named Natalie McDonald, a Harry Potter fan who was dying of leukaemia while Rowling was still writing the book. You see her character as a first-year who dons the sorting hat and is sorted into Gryffindor." | todayilearned |
"TIL that despite selling 30 million albums and having 9 top ten hits, Creedence Clearwater Revival were only together for four years." | todayilearned |
"TIL that to save the Hawaiian culture and people from disappearing, Kalākaua, the last king of the Hawaiian kingdom, went on a world tour in 1881, and travelled to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, and he became the first reigning monarch to circumnavigate the globe." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Robert Kearns, the inventor of intermittent windshield wipers, tried to sell his idea to the auto industry and was turned away. When they began showing up on new cars, he sued the manufacturers from the industry and won millions of dollars in settlements." | todayilearned |
"TIL in 1933, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were at a White House event when they whimsically abandoned their guests for a joyride. Both took turns flying and Roosevelt later stated, "It does mark an epoch, doesn't it, when a girl in an evening dress and slippers can pilot a plane at night."" | todayilearned |
"TIL after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, members of the yakuza gathered supplies and gave food to the victims. Some even opened their offices to people who couldn't return home. Some people felt like their response was much quicker and efficient than that of the government." | todayilearned |
"TIL that bears are considered by many wildlife biologists to be one of the most intelligent land animals of North America. They possess the largest and most convoluted brains relative to their size of any land mammal. In the animal kingdom, their intelligence compares with that of higher primates." | todayilearned |
"TIL The lack of an Oxford comma in the wording of a state law laying out what activities qualify a worker for overtime pay, more than 120 drivers for the Oakhurst Dairy became eligible for a multi-million settlement for unpaid overtime." | todayilearned |
"TIL Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada by a Greek immigrant, who was inspired by Chinese food to put a South American ingredient on an Italian dish, that went on to be most popular in Australia" | todayilearned |
"TIL A 2 year study showed that washing hands 5 times daily reduced incidence of respiratory infections by 45%." | todayilearned |
"TIL that if a pregnant woman has organ damage, the baby in her womb sends stem cells to help repair the organ." | todayilearned |
"TIL that in 1997 a poacher named Vladimir Markov shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill. The injured tiger staked out Markov's cabin, waited 12-48 hours for Markov to come home and then proceeded to kill him and eat him." | todayilearned |
"TIL: That a Japanese ice cream company created a commercial to publicly apologize about needing to raise the price of their ice cream bars for the first time in 25 years from 60 yen to 70 yen" | todayilearned |
"TIL that veterinarians kill themselves at rates 2.5 to 3.5 times the general population, due in part to online trolling and threats from pet owners who blame them for the death of a pet, and easy access to lethal medicines" | todayilearned |
"TIL that Mister Rogers once used an egg timer and simply let it run for sixty seconds on a television broadcast—in order to demonstrate how long a minute is. Unlike most TV made for kids, "Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood" was deliberately slow and contemplative." | todayilearned |
"TIL a man was attacked for having a beard in 1830, then imprisoned for defending himself. He died in 1873, by which time beards were fashionable. His tombstone reads, "Persecuted for wearing the beard."" | todayilearned |
"TIL that in 1971, burglars broke into an FBI office by writing a note that said “Please don’t lock this door tonight” and plastering it onto the front door. It worked and they stole several files." | todayilearned |
"TIL of the "idiot plot". The term was popularized by film critic Roger Ebert, who defines it as "ny plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots"." | todayilearned |
"TIL an IT Director, fed up with sales calls where the caller lied to reach IT staff, said to transfer one such caller 'straight to hell' . This led to the creation of a special extension for such calls where horrible hold music and faked queue messages play on an endless loop to increase hold time." | todayilearned |
"TIL, Calvin Klein's cologne 'Obsession' can draw big cats like Tigers, Jaguars etc from as far as half a mile, who then proceed to taking long sniffs and cuddling against the source, savouring the smell much longer than they savour even their meals" | todayilearned |
"TIL A Group Of Flat Earthers Spend $20,000 Trying To Prove Earth Is Flat, Accidentally Prove It's Round" | todayilearned |
"TIL George Lucas approved of Mel Brooks’ Star Wars parody Spaceballs and signed off on a fair use agreement. The only condition was that no Spaceballs merchandise would be made to compete with Star Wars merchandise. This is why there’s never been any Spaceballs figures, cereal, or flamethrower." | todayilearned |
"TIL that André the Giant grew so fast that his own parents didn't recognize him. He left home at 14 and returned at 19, having already become a professional wrestler. As he explained his career choice, they realized they had seen him wrestle on TV under his alias, without knowing it was their son." | todayilearned |
"TIL Out of all the species that ever lived throughout all of Earth’s history, only a fraction of a percent have fossilized. Even fewer are discovered by humans. Most of life’s history will be forever unknown" | todayilearned |
"TIL that Alan Alda met his wife of over 60 years at a dinner party when they were the only two guests who ate the rum cake after it fell on the kitchen floor." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Charles Dickens’ novels were hugely popular even among the illiterate poor. They would pool their money to hire a reader, and then gather together to listen to the stories." | todayilearned |
"TIL some Jewish males celebrate a second Bar Mitzvah at age 83, under the logic that the Torah states a normal lifespan is 70 years, thus an 83-year-old can be considered 13 in a second lifetime. This practice is becoming more common as people live longer, healthier lives" | todayilearned |
"TIL many Chinese medical tourists who go to South Korea for inexpensive and high quality plastic surgery have difficulty re-entering China due to their passports photos not matching their new face post op." | todayilearned |
"TIL The guy who started Atari sold the company and used the money to start Chuck E. Cheese" | todayilearned |
"TIL that Johnny Cash’s guitar player died in 1968. Cash found himself at a show where the temporary replacement, Carl Perkins, couldn’t make it. An audience member asked Cash if he could fill in for the night, and he said yes. Bob Wootton then became Cash’s guitar player for the next 29 years" | todayilearned |
"TIL that most states require car manufacturers to sell through the dealers. Even if your order directly from the factory, the order must go through the dealer. This dealer distribution system adds around 30% to the price of the cars." | todayilearned |
"TIL if a beta male mandrill wins a fight, it physically morphs into an alpha male over time, gaining facial coloration, bigger testicles, and the ability to breed." | todayilearned |
"TIL 1-800-COLLECT was so popular in the 90s that AT&T launched a competing service, 1-800-Operator. However AT&T later discovered many people misspell Operator with 'er' instead of 'or' at the end, and that unfortunately, 1-800-COLLECT owned the misspelled number and had been taking their customers." | todayilearned |
"TIL since 2015, Sesame Street has been funded by HBO due to PBS funding issues" | todayilearned |
"TIL that New Zealand author Janet Frame was falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic and was scheduled to be lobotomised. Several days before the operation, she won New Zealand's most prestigious literary prize, convincing doctors to cancel the procedure." | todayilearned |
"TIL The creator of The Sims, Will Wright, was inspired to make the game after losing his home and most of his material possessions in a fire in 1997. Thinking about the value of material needs as he rebuilt his life gave him the idea of a game where players managed the life of a suburban household." | todayilearned |
"TIL: John Francis, an American environmentalist, decided to stop speaking for a day to learn to listen better to his opponents. He turned it into a 17-year vow of silence. During those 17 years, he went to school and even earned a PhD." | todayilearned |
"TIL In the Netherlands, if you die and have no next of kin, friends or family to attend your funeral, they will send a poet who shall read a custom poem for you at your funeral so that you won’t be alone that day. It was started by poet and artist F Staril and is named "The Lonely Funeral" project." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived president, the longest-retired president, the first president to live forty years after their inauguration, and the first to reach the age of 95." | todayilearned |
"TIL that physicist Nikola Tesla once paid an overdue hotel bill with a box containing a working model of his ‘death beam‘, warning employees never to open it because of the danger. They hid the box & when it was discovered years later & opened, found to contain old (harmless) electrial parts." | todayilearned |
"TIL that in Churchill, Manitoba, it is customary to leave car doors unlocked in order to provide other residents a quick escape should they come face-to-face with a polar bear." | todayilearned |
"TIL a Guatemalan boy saw soldiers come into his village and murder his parents along with the rest of the village, was adopted and raised in an abusive household by one of the men who massacred the villagers, and later gave testimony that sent the killer to prison with a 6,000 year sentence" | todayilearned |
"TIL in 1897, 3 Swedes attempted to be the first people to reach the North Pole. They travelled by hot air balloon but crashed after 65 hours. 33 years later, a ship discovered their camp, along with their dead bodies, journal, and camera. They'd survived for weeks by killing and eating polar bears." | todayilearned |
"TIL that the robbery of the Federal Reserve in Die Hard with a Vengeance is so plausible that the FBI actually questioned the screenwriter on how he had such intimate knowledge of the vaults." | todayilearned |
"TIL Getty Images, a company infamous for sending threatening letters requesting payment when their photos are used without permission, was sued for more than $1 billion in damages when they mistakenly demanded a “settlement payment” from a photographer for her own work." | todayilearned |
"TIL Kraft Foods introduced its boxed macaroni and cheese in 1937 when America was in the throes of the Great Depression with the promise that buyers could feed a family of four for 19 cents. Kraft sold 8 million boxes of its quick-and-easy macaroni and cheese the first year" | todayilearned |
"TIL three 13 year old girls submitted a script for "Tiny Toon Adventures". Producer Steven Spielberg was so impressed that he invited the girls to Hollywood to work on the episode and paid them $3,000. This later inspired a Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa write an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Daniel Radcliffe is a recovering alcoholic and would sometimes go to set for Harry Potter still drunk from the night before." | todayilearned |
"TIL During WW2 Joe Medicine Crow, a native American, completed all four feats required to be a war chief: touching an enemy without killing him, taking an enemy's weapon, leading a war party and stealing 50 horses from the SS, singing a Crow honour song as he rode away." | todayilearned |
"TIL it is 100% legal be to buried at sea in the USA. You basically wrap the body in a sheet with some weights, at least 3 miles from shore and throw it off the boat. The Navy even has a program to assist veterans of the armed services." | todayilearned |
"TIL that Paul McCartney, as a vegetarian and animal rights activist, only agreed to appear on The Simpsons if Lisa's decision to become a vegetarian in that episode was made permanent. He is literally the only reason Lisa is still a vegetarian." | todayilearned |
"TIL that although Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was written to include cannons firing and cathedral bells, synchronising them with an orchestra proved all but impossible. It wasn't until 1954 that composer Antal Doráti mixed a studio recording with cannons and bells, finally playing it as intended." | todayilearned |
"TIL when Cristiano Ronaldo was asked to donate his cleats to a 10-month-old kid who had a brain disorder, he instead gave $83k to fully pay for the surgery the child would have." | todayilearned |
"TIL that when Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco was commanded to round up all Moroccan Jews for relocation to Nazi concentration camps, he said "There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects." Not a single Moroccan Jew was deported or killed during WWII." | todayilearned |
"TIL that the details of the Manhattan Project were so secret that many workers had no idea why they did their jobs. A laundrywoman had a dedicated duty to "hold up an instrument and listen for a clicking noise" without knowing why. It was a Geiger counter testing the radiation levels of uniforms." | todayilearned |
"TIL in 1960, an Australian father won nearly $3 million (adjusted AU$) in the lottery, with his picture getting plastered all over the news. Shortly after, his 8-year-old son was kidnapped for ransom and eventually murdered. This changed anonymity laws for lottery winners in Australia forever." | todayilearned |
"TIL a woman told an auto shop she had to cancel her service appt. as her car was stolen. One of the 3 Tulsa men who own the auto shop called her back the next day to tell her he & his buddies are chasing her stolen car. With TPD dispatch, they got her car back after after a 15 min chase." | todayilearned |
"TIL California law allows employees to take two hours paid time off in the beginning or end of the work day to vote on election day." | todayilearned |
"TIL 20,000 year-old fossilized human footprints were discovered in Australia which indicate the man who made them was running at the speed of a modern Olympic sprinter, barefoot, in sand." | todayilearned |
"TIL about Lynlee, the baby that was born twice. Pediatric surgeons, removed her from the womb to cut out a tumor on her spine, placed her back and several weeks later Lynlee was born healthy" | todayilearned |
"TIL Ray Burton, who was the father of Cliff Burton, used Cliff's royalties for the first 3 Metallica albums to fund kids scholarships at Castro Valley High School. Ray wanted to keep his sons name alive by putting kids through collage with his sons royalties for 30 years." | todayilearned |
"TIL a cow in Poland escaped on its way to the slaughterhouse, broke through a metal fence, swam to a nearby island, and was allowed to live there after its owner gave up trying to recapture it." | todayilearned |
"TIL Hall of Fame pitcher Lee Smith didn’t play baseball until he was a junior in high school, only tried out to win a $10 bet, and only started pitching after his team’s star pitcher was killed in a hunting accident. His first start was a no hitter" | todayilearned |
"TIL the quietest place on Earth is in a small studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At -13 dBA it’s so quiet you can hear the internal workings of your body." | todayilearned |
"TIL John F. Kennedy enjoyed a "privileged childhood of elite private schools, sailboats, servants and summer homes" during the Great Depression. He later claimed that he only learned about the Great Depression in the books he read while attending Harvard." | todayilearned |
"TIL Bill Gates Has Given Away $28 Billion Since 2007, Saving 6 Million Lives" | todayilearned |
"TIL that Louis Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant for most of his life, up until the day he died, to commemorate a Jewish family that had taken him in and cared for him as a child." | todayilearned |
"TIL that a lottery winner wore a scream mask to collect his one million so that his relatives won't take his money" | todayilearned |
"TIL defensive tackle Derrick Nnadi vowed to pay the average adoption fee of $150 for every dog at a Missouri shelter if the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl. They won, and Nnadi paid the fees. A few days later, all 109 shelter dogs had been adopted." | todayilearned |
"TIL that James McCormick sold the ADE 651, a fake ‘bomb detector’, all over the world (specifically Iraq) by purchasing novelty golf ball detectors for less than $20 and reselling it for $5000 each. His scam has cost lives and the ‘bomb detectors’ are probably still in use today." | todayilearned |
"TIL a couple invited Queen Elizabeth to their wedding as a joke and she actually showed up" | todayilearned |
"TIL Biz Markie was not supposed to sing the chorus in his hit song "Just a Friend", but none of the people he invited showed up at the studio so he sang it himself." | todayilearned |
"TIL a depressed man built a secret room within his bedroom containing a homemade guillotine with a timer, took sleeping pills, and set the timer to kill himself without his father knowing what he was doing for months. He was successful." | todayilearned |
"TIL Danny DeVito did the dub for his role as the titular character in The Lorax (2012) in Russian, German, Italian, Catalan, and Castilian Spanish, despite not speaking any of those languages" | todayilearned |
"TIL that there is a specific clause in The Simpsons' contract that the network can't give notes, make cuts or exert creative control over episodes, meaning the producers have free rein to poke fun of FOX itself." | todayilearned |
"TIL about Ewa Wiśnierska, a german paraglider that got surprised by a thunderstorm and got sucked up by a cumulonimbus cloud to an altitude of 10.000m (33.000ft). She survived temperatures of -50*C and extreme oxygen deprivation at a height higher than the Mt. Everest." | todayilearned |
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