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TIL Freddie Blassie, a heel wrestler in the 60's, claimed to have caused heart attacks among tv viewers in Japan due to his gimmick of biting his opponents and drawing blood. Blassie boasted "In my whole career, 92 people dropped dead of heart attacks. My ambition was to kill 100, and I failed,”

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eA75 TIL Robert Taylor, inventor of soap-in-a-pump-bottle (Softsoap), knew larger competitors like Colgate would try to copy his product. In order to ensure they couldn’t copy him, he bought every small bottle hand-pump (100 million bottles) in the US. This resulted in a year of the market to himself
woOro TIL That Franz Marc's famous painting The Tower of Blue Horses was last seen in a 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art, and has been searched for ever since.
8eN5P TIL that in 1944 the CIA created a manual on sabotaging organizations. Among other things, it suggests to "make speeches... at great length", "refer all matters to committees", "make committees as large as possible", "insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products"
M74LK TIL The Diderot Effect which states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.
RKll TIL David Letterman sponsors a scholarship at Ball State that is supposedly awarded to “average” students, since he was a mediocre student.