Post * Kg6B — Curious Curator

› added 11 years ago

128

TIL country singer Dolly Parton anonymously entered a “Dolly Parton look-alike contest” but lost to a drag queen.

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8ybb TIL Emmy was the ship’s cat on the RMS Empress of Ireland. She never missed a voyage. However, on 28 May 1914, Emmy tried to escape the ship. The crew could not coax her aboard and the Empress left without her, which was regarded as a terrible omen. Early the next morning the Empress sank.

kOjPg TIL that Disney executives rejected Back to the Future in the 1980s because they thought the script was raunchy. They explicitly qualified the scene of Marty and his mum (in the past) sitting inside a car as "incestuous."

woYG1 TIL that J. M. Barrie "invented" the name Wendy in his novel Peter Pan. Although it saw some minor use a a nickname for centuries, as a given name it was only popularized by the novel. Barry was inspired by his friend's daughter, who called him her "fwiendy-wendy", as she could not pronounce "r's".

Z8JwY TIL In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford.

yV50a TIL that scientists once believed mensurating women exert a "dangerous force" called menotoxin. While the term disappeared from the literature in the 1970s, the concept of menotoxin was never convincingly proven or disproven.