› added 5 months ago

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TIL that when cars were new, hitting a pedestrian was a serious matter called a motor killing. As it happened more as there were more cars and more crashes, Car Manufacturers hired public relations spin doctors to invent the word Jaywalker to shift fault to pedestrians for getting hurt and dying.

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rRQme TIL the neck rings don't really stretch the neck, they push the shoulders and clavicles down to create the illusion of a longer neck, and removing them incorrectly may cause death because the neck muscles weaken so much they can't support the head on their own.
GYJbG TIL of MLB player Lenny Dykstra who paid a team of private investigators $500,000 to dig up dirt on MLB umpires. He used the information to leverage a more favorable strike zone during games.
Oogb6 TIL that the archaic study of head shape (Phrenology) is responsible for many sayings. Intelligent people had a "highbrow", stupid people had a "lowbrow", people with balanced attributes' heads were "well-rounded" and psychiatrists would reduce areas of people's brains and were called "shrinks".
awAry TIL that Jewish communities had lower death rates during the 14th c. Black Death due to their hygienic practices. This in part inspired a wave of antisemitic violence in Christian Europe, where some communities attributed the pandemic to a Jewish conspiracy.
woGvM TIL that Audrey Hepburn declined the offer from Otto Frank to play his daughter, Anne, in the 1959 film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Audrey declined, because she did not want to relive her wartime experiences in German occupied Holland.