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TIL a lawsuit between Gilbert O'Sullivan and Biz Markie over a sampling of "Alone Again" led to the requirement of licensing and fees to sample parts of song, which in turn made it prohibitively expensive to sample multiple songs into a new piece, which had been a common practice in hip hop

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VBRYQ TIL Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was the first man to die during a space-flight. He volunteered to pilot a hastily built and fatally flawed spacecraft alone in order to save the life of the man who would replace him if he refused — his close friend and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin
jLVv TIL in 1937 Hitler told a British official that the British should “shoot Gandhi, and if this doesn’t suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of the Congress, and if that doesn’t suffice shoot 200, and so on, as you make it clear that you mean business.”
ZpXmQ TIL The Simpsons' show-within-a-show, "The Itchy and Scratchy Show", isn't actually based on Tom and Jerry. It's based on a more obscure cartoon called "Herman and Katnip," which was notorious for being violent and mean-spirited.
W79lY TIL Male bees and wasps cannot sting you. A stinger is a modified ovipositor.
pYEYA TIL that about 80% of the animal and plant species in Madagascar are unique to the island and found nowhere else on Earth.