› added 11 years ago

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TIL The Segway inventor is still alive. The company’s owner (Jim Heselden) is the one who felt off the cliff and died in a Segway accident, not the inventor (Dean Kamen).

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d87p9 TIL that in 1972, Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack shot a feature-length documentary on Aretha Franklin but forgot to use clapperboards, which made it impossible to sync audio and video and left all of the footage unusable. The film was finally salvaged and released 46 years later.
w7KP TIL Kim Jong-il, Great Leader and film-lover, had South Korea’s most famous actress and her director husband kidnapped and held hostage for eight years in order to force them to make movies he liked.
l7e87 TIL that the original "Diddy" sued Sean Combs over the name in 2006—and won!
9Y55Q TIL of the Pequot War (1636-1638), now considered a genocide by historians. English settlers led a campaign against the Pequot tribe, culminating with the Mystic massacre, when Pequot women and children were set on fire. Afterwards, Connecticut was formed and the word "Pequot" was banned.
RD1 TIL Doctor Seuss’s first book took 27 publisher rejections before it finally found a taker, Chicken Soup for the Soul was passed on by over 100, A Time to Kill by 26, and George Orwell was told Animal Farm would never sell because “it is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.”