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TIL The cliché "It was a dark and stormy night" originally opened a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, about a highwayman sentenced to death by a judge who turns out to be his father. Bulwer-Lytton infamously convinced Dickens to change "Great Expectations" to give it a more conventional "happy" ending.

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W7EWA TIL Chipotle only uses legs and thighs from the chicken, while the breasts are sold to Panera Bread
L5MP TIL in 1988, Mark Wahlberg assaulted two Vietnamese men, knocking one man unconscious and permanently blinding the other, calling them “slant-eyed gooks”. He ended up serving 45 days for the crime.
9YEoQ TIL before 1975, the BBC overwrote or destroyed old show tapes. Hundreds of Doctor Who episodes were thought lost forever, until a worldwide hunt began to turn them up—e.g. 2 in a London Mormon Church, and a goldmine 9 in Nigeria (employees had ignored instructions to burn them). 97 remain unfound.
reQ4 TIL when Microsoft bought all rights to Charles O'Rear’s iconic ‘Bliss’ photo, depicting green hills and a blue sky, they wanted the original film. When the courier learned how valuable it was, they declined to ship it due to lower insurance limits; O'Rear had to personally deliver it to Seattle.
GYEYg TIL of "Penis Fencing", where two hermaphroditic flatworms battle each other with their dagger-like penises to determine which one will stab the other and inject them with their sperm