› added 2 days ago

2

TIL that Clint Eastwood personally called Richard Harris to ask him to play English Bob in the 1992 film Unforgiven. Harris was, at that moment, watching High Plains Drifter, another Eastwood film. This led Harris to believe he was being pranked.

OoOea TIL Alexander Hamilton didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American “disease.” He fought—with military force—any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it.
M7EGm TIL that one man, Thomas Nast, created the modern illustration of Uncle Sam, the symbol for both major political parties, and the modern image of Santa Claus. He also helped popularize the dollar sign as a symbol of greed and corruption in his political cartoons.
rNB64 TIL a team of 3 students won $700K for using AI to decipher the first passages of a 2,000-year-old scroll; 1 of 800 scrolls that were carbonized by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE. Since their discovery in the 1700s, trying to read them proved futile because unrolling them by hand caused damage
mx8oO TIL when the new character Elmrya was forcefully added to the show “Pinky and the Brain” due to executives wanting to liven it up, the writers added the lyrics: “So Pinky and the Brain/ Share a new domain/ It’s what the network wants/ Why bother to complain?” to its theme song.
Ook7a TIL John Napier, the Scottish mathematician who discovered logarithms, was the 4th great-grandfather of the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton