› added 12 years ago

187

TIL that under Operation Dirty Trick, the US would blame Fidel Castro if the 1962 Mercury space flight, which was carrying astronaut John Glenn, crashed.

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E1bJ7 TIL In Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks made the farts louder to prevent the audience’s laughter from drowning them out and TV execs muffled the farts as not to offend their viewers.
8kGG TIL at an Amazon.com warehouse in Pennsylvania, workers were required to work – in some cases walking 15 miles a day – in 100+ degree heat. When the news broke, Amazon’s initial response was to keep an ambulance outside the warehouse.
78xnO TIL that Emma Hauck (1878–1920) was a German outsider artist known for the letters she wrote to her husband while in a mental hospital. The letters were never delivered but are now regarded as art for their abstraction and repetition, often just “Come sweetheart” or “Come” written repeatedly.
rRrE1 TIL that when Upton Sinclair published his landmark 1906 work "The Jungle” about the lives of meatpacking factory workers, he hoped it would lead to worker protection reforms. Instead, it lead to sanitation reforms, as middle class readers were horrified their meat came from somewhere so unsanitary.
0wrZj TIL that, in 1913, a Nebraska man took a butcher knife and threatened to kill his wife and newborn son. The mother left him, remarried, and had the boy's name changed to that of his step-father. The boy, now known as Gerald Ford, later went on to become the 38th President of the United States.