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TIL A Soap Opera is the inspiration for the Harley Quinn character. Writer Paul Dini needed the Joker to have a sidekick and was friends with Arleen Sorkin. Dini remembered Sorkin had appeared as a jester in a dream sequence on Days of Our Lives and used the scene as an inspiration for Quinn.

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0d8MA TIL In 1833, Britain used 40% of its national budget to pass the Slavery Abolition Act. The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, but nothing was paid to the enslaved people themselves. The loan was one of the largest in history and wasn't paid off until 2015.
jNnn TIL that when Alfred Hitchcock was a boy his father sent him to the police with a letter. When the Sherrif read the letter he put young Alfred in jail for ten minutes. When he released him he said" this is what happens to bad people.“ From then on Hitchcock was afraid of cops and would never drive.
xL8w TIL the Marines use a non-lethal heat beam to ward off people “causing a feeling similar to being on fire”
woGeM TIL that the earliest known published collection of liturgical music in Hebrew was published exactly 400 years ago, in 1623, by Salamone Rossi, a Jewish musician at the court of Mantua, Italy, who was so well-thought of that he was excused from wearing the yellow badge required of Jews
D1ebg TIL in 1920, The New York Times ridiculed Robert H. Goddard and claimed that rockets could not function in space. On July 17, 1969, a day after the Apollo 11 launch, NYT formally acknowledged their error