› added 6 years ago

89

TIL That ACME in the Looney Tunes Cartoons was supposed to be ironic. Acme comes from a Greek word meaning "pinnacle" or "peak" implying "the peak of greatness" and that the product would be the best you could get. Any product with the name in the show was guaranteed to fail spectacularly.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

wobEJ TIL that Stephen Stucker, best known for his role as the mad traffic controller in the 1980 movie Airplane, died only six years later to AIDs. He publicly revealed his condition in 1985, making him one of the first popular entertainers to be lost to recently discovered disease. He was 38.
R75E1 TIL Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971 by slashing his throat. He had been unable to secure financing for his films, fired from a 20th Century Fox epic production, and considered by many as old-fashioned. His hardships continued until the mid 1980s when he made Ran, his last masterwork.
4ke06 TIL when Alexander Kerensky died in New York City in 1970, local Russian orthodox church refused to grant him burial rites for being a Freemason and seeing him as responsible for the Bolsheviks taking power. He was flown to London and buried in a non-denominational cemetery.
loMxG TIL It is estimated that 70% of a feral hog population must be harvested every year to continue reducing the population size
oRyQ8 TIL Sunday Times took its name not because it was related to Times, but to take advantage of its name. Both papers ran separately for more than a century until they were bought by Canadian billionaire.