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TIL that Weird Al Yankovic has never accepted any outside ideas or titles for a song, with one exception- Madonna herself asked when he was going to turn “Like a Virgin” into “Like a Surgeon”

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awPeL TIL that when filming Zulu (1964) in South Africa, when the authorities warned the British crew that interracial sex was punishable by whipping, the producer responded by asking "if he could have the lashes while doing it".
BrE9x TIL author Michael Crichton felt one of his college writing professors was unfairly grading his essays C+. In what he described as a scientific experiment, Crichton submitted an essay by George Orwell under his own name and the professor gave him a B-.
lo1DB TIL that 7 years after the U.S. acquired of what is today Washington state, "Columbia" was originally given the name of the new territory in 1853. However, Congress changed the name to "Washington", arguing that people would easily be confused with the nation's capital, the District of Columbia.
5YpGR TIL In the 1890s, electric bicycles were documented within various U.S. patents. However, in 1992 hardly any commercial electric bicycles were available and the terms E-Bike, power bike, pedelec, assisted bicycle, and power-assisted bicycle only became popular by 2001
e0XeD TIL about the 1969 book "Naked Came the Stranger", a literary hoax - the book was written to be disjointed and terrible, but full of sex scenes, to prove that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. The novel spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List.