› added 11 years ago

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TIL John Swartzwelder, a writer for the Simpsons used to write episodes while sitting in a booth at a coffee shop “drinking copious amounts of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes”. When California passed an anti-smoking law, he bought the diner booth and installed it in his house.

Z8MJY TIL Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, was only given the name "Ham" after successfully completing his mission. He was known as Number 65 before that, as NASA believed that it would be bad publicity if a "named" chimp burned up in the atmosphere or otherwise died as a result of mission failure.
R4ja TIL In 1972 Lyle Snider, a Quaker who didn’t want his tax dollars going to fund war, was arrested for claiming 3 billion dependents, the population of the Earth, on his W-4 form. Snider was charged with filing a false and fraudulent withholding form, and sentenced to 9 months in prison.
R7Gm1 TIL that the Navy has a program for intentionally sinking old vessels to become artificial reefs for marine life. The first and largest of these vessels was the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier built at the end of WWII, which was sent to the ocean floor off the coast of Florida in 2006.
m1rVv TIL In 1955 a runaway light plane took off by itself and spent 3 hours flying unpiloted over Sydney, Australia. Three separate Airforce attempts to shoot it down failed, before two Navy pilots made a successful 'kill' 5 miles offshore.
E1Ado TIL Ford Motor Company paid for an uncensored, commercial free airing of Schindler’s List in Primetime on NBC in 1997. It included two short intermissions with countdown clocks.