› added 8 months ago

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TIL after viewing a rough cut of Romancing the Stone & expecting it to flop, the producers of the then-under-development Cocoon fired Robert Zemeckis as their film's director. But RtS was a surprise hit as the 6th-highest-grossing film of 1984 ($115 m) & allowed Zemeckis to make Back to the Future.

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5YOmP TIL about a UN weapons inspector (David Kelly) who after declaring that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs (contradicting Britain's motive for involvement in the war) was found dead of an apparent suicide just 2 days later. His postmortem examination was then made classified for 70 years.
gMLXy TIL that teppanyaki is not a traditional Japanese method of cooking and dates back only to 1945, when the first teppanyaki steakhouse opened in Japan.
Q8Mp TIL Al Capone’s brother was a distinguished prohibition agent and acted as bodyguard to a US president.
Ra8j TIL that a Canadian teenager once settled out of court and exchanged his domain name MikeRoweSoft.com for an xbox and games from Microsoft
AD8Dl TIL of Edward Jones, a teenager who broke into Buckingham Palace multiple times in 1838-1841. The first time he was only 14-years-old and managed to steal some of Queen Victoria’s underwear.