› added 11 years ago

91

TIL that when Frank Morgan, the man that played the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, was picking out a jacket to use for his role as the Wizard, he turned out one of the pockets of the jacket and discovered a label indicating that the coat had once belonged to Oz author L. Frank Baum.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

gR5b TIL the Italian words widely used in New Jersey differ greatly from mainstream Italian today not because of bad “copying” but because the words came from people speaking an Italian dialect that subsequently died out in Italy
VMQMZ TIL about the "Tetris Effect" in which, after playing Tetris for a long time, your brain begins imagining and rearranging real world objects as if they were pieces in the game.
p8Web TIL During ancient Roman times, the iconic marble sculptures weren't actually white. They were actually painted and have just lost their paint over the hundreds of years.
aKky TIL that a manufacturing defect saved a mobster’s life. A car bomb detonated under Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal’s 1981 Cadillac Eldorado, but GM installed a metal plate under the driver’s seat in that model to correct its balance, protecting him from the explosion. (‘Casino’ (1995) depicts the bombing.)
9Ym6r TIL James Doohan from Star Trek received a suicide note from a fan. He told her he wanted to see her at his next con. She began to visit him multiple cons before he lost contact with her. 8 years later he got a letter of thanks from her and saying she now had a masters in electrical engineering.