› added 5 months ago

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TIL because George Kennedy was the only actor in all four Airport movies, he was offered a role in its parody film, Airplane. He turned it down, because he "didn't want to kill off his Airport cash cow."

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E1NdW TIL that in 1994, the pilot of a commercial airline allowed his 16-year-old son to sit at the plane's controls during a flight. The kid touched something he shouldn't have, inadvertently disengaged the autopilot and caused the plane to crash. Everyone onboard perished.
gMYPA TIL a baby penguin was born without feathers in a Chinese zoo and was thus rejected by his parents, but the zookeepers found out he had digestion problems so they fed him by hand until he grew feathers and was reunited with his parents
J1PJk TIL a large percentage of the drugs smuggled across the US border are smuggled by addicted people or others in financial hardship, who are paid little but need the money to sustain their lives. Some carry fentanyl pills inside their body that can easily kill them if accidentally absorbed.
m1Yxy TIL in 1996, surveyor Mike Tate got a side street in NC renamed for the band Anthrax. After the 2001 Anthrax attacks, town residents were suddenly uncomfortable with the name and petitioned to have it changed.
1adpX TIL Physicist Brian Schmidt made a bet with his colleague Sean Carroll, betting that we wouldn’t know the value of the cosmological density parameter within 20 years. Brian lost the bet by figuring it out himself, which earned him a Nobel prize.