› added 10 months ago

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TIL an 1858 heatwave caused the River Thames to reek unbearably due to raw sewage dumping. The stench was so intense that Parliament ended sessions early, and curtains were soaked in chloride to mask the smell. This was the tipping point that finally pushed London to build a modern sewer system.

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1ElV TIL that George Clooney was paid more to make Ocean’s Eleven (20 million) than his character earned from robbing casinos (12.3 million).
R7VQ4 TIL A 700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?
kOEb1 TIL: Friday 13th Superstition has its origins in a Norse myth about 12 gods having a dinner party at Valhalla. The uninvited 13th guest, the mischievous god Loki arranged for Hoder, the blind god of darkness, to shoot Balder the Beautiful, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow
OG5Je TIL that the famous scene in "Apocalypse Now" where Martin Sheen’s character has a drunken breakdown in a hotel room, was not scripted. One day, Sheen got completely shitfaced and ordered the crew to film him. He got aggressive and started punching out mirrors. Francis Ford Coppola kept rolling.
wLdeP TIL that the toy manufacturer Toy Biz successfully argued in court that their X-Men action figures were not based on humans, but mutants, meaning that they would not be eligible for a tariff on human-based toys