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TIL A tradition of High Wycombe, UK, involves its Mayor being weighed annually in public on a specially erected scale, and their weight compared with the previous year. If it has increased, it means they have been indulging in too much good living at taxpayers’ expense, and the crowd jeers and boos

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JY80k TIL Warren Zevon's famous "Werewolves of London" was the product of Phil Everly jokingly telling Zevon to adapt the title of the film Werewolf of London into a song and dance craze. Zevon and others wrote the song in 15 minutes
Aer4 TIL that Leon Trotsky wrote a book called “The Revolution Betrayed” where he accurately predicted the deterioration of communism, Stalin’s totalitarianism, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union
R7e67 TIL John Everett Millais had a model sit in a bathtub for five months for his painting depicting Lady Ophelia's death by drowning.
wLWXJ TIL about the Great Hanging at Gainesville, a confederate war crime where 41 suspected unionists were executed in October of 1862
GA7w5 TIL that Walt Disney World began as "The Florida Project". Dummy corporations were used, by Walt Disney Productions, to buy up 27,000 acres of land to avoid bursts of land speculation in the Orlando area. Early rumors assumed possible development by NASA, Ford, the Rockefellers, and Howard Hughes.