› added 4 years ago

193

TIL that early in his stand-up career Steve Martin once took the entire audience next door to a McDonald's and ordered 300 hamburgers only to then change the order to 'one small fries'

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via reddit.com

w5Ao TIL Fanta was invented in Nazi Germany, due to the difficulty importing Coca Cola syrup
5YGLn TIL that the 1904 Olympics Marathon was a total mess. One did most of the marathon in a car, another ate rat poison but survived and one took a nap by the side of the road for some part of the marathon.Details in the link.
pZm8 TIL that in the 1983 Monopoly championship, a player sold his 3 hotels for 12 houses in order to lessen the number of house tokens that his opponents could use. The move was called a “forced building shortage” and was ruled illegal.
P1bdJ TIL that the Norden Bombsight used by US Bomber aircraft in WWII cost $1.1 billion to research and produce, about half as much as the Manhattan Project and over a quarter of the cost of all B-17 bombers manufactured. While successfully precise in Stateside testing it was far less accurate in combat.
kOLD4 TIL Anton LaVey's writings (author of "The Satanic Bible") were influenced by Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken, the members of the carnival with whom LaVey had supposedly worked in his youth, P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, John Milton, and Lord Byron.