› added 12 years ago

85

TIL General Motors deliberately destroyed streetcars as a strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

VMV04 TIL that in the 70s the US and Soviet baby feared the other had developed a new antisubmarine weapon that damaged wires rubber attached to probes due to deep circle holes left in the rubber, it turns out that these were in fact the bite marks of the relatively unknown cookie cutter sharks
YpKRd TIL about The Really Terrible Orchestra, founded by author Alexander McCall Smith in 1995. It exists for the musically challenged aka. "those who have been prevented from playing music through lack of talent".
5Y9Ok TIL that the character Danny Trejo plays in the Spy Kids series is canonically the same person as his character in Machete. The Spy Kids' uncle is actually a paid assassin in his own series of R-rated movies.
4XlpX TIL of the condition Hikikomori which is seen among the youth of Japan and is also seen in UK, US, etc. Hikikomoris are reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from society and seek extreme degrees of isolation and confinement. It is estimated that there are about a million hikikomoris in Japan
8oEP TIL that Simon & Garfunkel’s first album was so unsuccessful that the duo split. Their producer took one of the songs from the album, overdubbed and remixed it without their knowledge or permission, and after this version of “The Sounds of Silence” became a hit, they reunited for four more albums.