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TIL the Nintendo character Kirby was named after John Kirby, a lawyer who successfully defended Nintendo when Universal sued them for stealing the idea of Donkey Kong from the King Kong franchise

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9wvVD TIL "Wacky WallWalkers" were a fad in the early 1980s. The toys were molded out of a sticky elastomer and shaped similar to a spider. When one was thrown against a wall, it would then "walk" its way down. Over 240 million were sold. They were also free in specially marked boxes of cereals.
VBmb0 TIL Chairman of China Deng Xiaoping died in 1997, 2 years after the release of the infamous Super Famicom game Hong Kong 97 which he's the main antagonist of, meaning this dogpile of a game predicted the chairman's death somehow
ADVBw TIL scientists give funny names to genetically variant fruit flies; (Ken & Barbie): flies that fail to develop external genitalia, (Maggie): Flies that fail to develop past a certain stage & are named after Maggie from the Simpsons, (Cheap Date): A fly that expresses high sensitivity to alcohol.
E1NNw TIL that Clint Eastwood hated the cigars that his character smoked in the “Dollars Trilogy”. Because he would have to do multiple takes, he smoked them quite a bit. According to Eli Wallach, Eastwood would sometimes tell the director: “You’d better get it this time, because I’m going to throw up.”
W79OL Today I learned that eight elements were discovered in the village of Ytterby in Sweden, and four of these elements (yttrium, terbium, erbium, and ytterbium) were named after Ytterby itself.