› added 9 years ago

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TIL that in Paraguay, 2004, almost 400 people died and nearly 500 got injured in a supermarket fire, because the owners locked all the doors to prevent people from fleeing without paying for merchandise.

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1avrW TIL About Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient who spontaneously took up drawing to calm himself. His work included a monumental and epic illustrated book of 45 volumes, 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages in which he narrated his own imaginary life story.
8e6lK TIL: BBC interviewed a man who married a fictional girl. In 2019, 12% of people in Japan reported falling in love with anime/game characters. According to Sociologist Masahiro Yamada, the rise in pseudo relationships is due to hard work life and a dwindling pool of well paid men.
5VnnR TIL Roseanne Barr pitched a version of UK series "Absolutely Fabulous" starring Carrie Fisher and Bond villain Barbara Carrera for ABC. According to the network in 1996, "they rejected the show’s original sex-and-drugs-packed script." HBO was also interested, according to Barr's then publicist.
7rg8O TIL that the word "Nazi" is actually German slang for "backwards peasant", a term that existed before the Nazi party. We used it as an insulting abbreviation the their actual name, Nationalsozialistische. Hitler hated being called a Nazi. Also, the origins of a bunch of other terms.
5Yjv9 TIL of US Army Major General Peter Conover Hains, the only Civil War officer to see duty in World War I