› added 9 months ago

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TIL Neil Armstrong was filmed as he stepped on the moon with a $2.3 million upside-down camera. Westinghouse built for Apollo 11 a special model that the astronaut deployed by pulling a handle near the ladder he climbed down onto the lunar surface. NASA inverted the image for the TV audience.

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ZpDlY TIL Mel Brooks won an Oscar for making fun of his own movie. After watching an abstract animated short Brooks commissioned his own short and improvised a commentary to make The Critic (1963) which won Brooks his first Oscar.
7rbNb TIL that the “Star Spangled Banner,” the United States’ National Anthem, uses the exact melody of an old English drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven” which was popular among Americans in 1812
mxpVR TIL that the large crowd that had gathered for the first execution by guillotine was greatly upset by the "clinical" nature of the device and its swiftness. They wanted a longer execution for more entertainment.
YpOa7 TIL in 2016 two alligators were found guarding €500,000 worth of crystal meth, €300,000 in cash, and several firearms in Amsterdam. The owner of the crocodiles was following the law and had the appropriate permits for the animals.
dD9X7 TIL Capcom’s best selling and arguably most popular game in the MegaMan series, MegaMan 2, was done in the developers’ free time as Capcom did not want to allocate resources to the game due to poor sales of MM1.