› added 7 years ago

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TIL in 1970, Billy Joel wrote a suicide note and attempted to commit suicide by drinking furniture polish, stating it looked ‘tastier than bleach’. He later published his suicide note as a song in his first album, “Cold Spring Harbor”. The song would be titled, “Tomorrow is Today.”

b9RPj TIL that the origin of the idiom "Red Herring" was itself a red herring. It was originally stated that red herring were used to help hounds sniff out prey. It's misleading because red herring were actually used to train horses and were only used if there were no dead cats available instead.
Me1pb TIL Tesseract is the name of a real geometrical concept - it is a cube in 4-dimensional space. It is a 4D shape whose every face is a cube. Just like a cube can be unfolded into 6 squares in 2D space, a tesseract can be unfolded into 8 cubes in 3D space.
X07x8 TIL Looney Tunes character Pepé Le Pew was based on the 1937 French film Pépé le Moko where the main character says the line "Come with me to ze Casbah"
OxB4 TIL the Cinderella Castle (189 ft) and Tower of Terror (199 ft) at Disney World (Orlando, FL, USA) are intentionally under 200 feet (61 m) tall to avoid regulations that would require it to have flashing aircraft warning lights at the top.
OG6YX TIL Gordon Lightfoot was inspired to write "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" when he saw the name misspelled as "Edmond" in Newsweek magazine. He felt the misspelling dishonored the memory of the 29 men who died when the freighter sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10, 1975.