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TIL that Howard Ashman, the lyricist for Disney's The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, was a gay man who passed away due to AIDS-related complications before the latter came out. His perspective on being a gay man directly affected both of the aforementioned movies via characters and tropes

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4kgeR TIL after fathers drown at sea, people in the fishing village Skinningrove, England, have a ritual to take the sons out to ensure they don’t get fearful of it.
699nm TIL there was disagreement over the danger of black widow spider bites until a 1933 experiment where professor Allan Blair allowed himself to be bitten. Blair also hoped to determine whether multiple bites would build immunity, but the first bite proved so painful that he decided against it.
5Yedr TIL that a UK zoo banned visitors from wearing animal print clothes because it confuses the animals. "If someone wears the same pattern to the animal's coat they can become over friendly," a zoo spokesperson said.
awy4A TIL that in 1954, in Italy, a soccer match (Fiorentina vs Pistoiese) was suspended because multiple unidentified flying objects were spoted above the stadium and the whole city of Firenze. After a while a white sticky substance started falling from the sky. What happened is still a mistery.
9wPAM TIL the band Green Day got its name from the phrase, "green day", which was slang in the Bay Area, where the band originated, for spending a day doing nothing but smoking marijuana. Armstrong once admitted in 2001 that he considered it to be "the worst band name in the world".