› added 5 years ago

61

TIL "The Deer Hunter" in 1978 was the first film to use Oscars as a marketing tool. Being too depressing for the box office, it did screenings for film critics and Academy members. It gained nine nominations and won Best Picture, and then that was used to make it a commercial success.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

4mRJ TIL skipping the microphone/menu and going straight to the first window at In-N-Out is referred to as a “Home Run”. Your reciept will mention the fact that you have scored a “Home Run”. I found this out first hand by mistake today.
R7kPl TIL "Smart Aleck" was a real person, Alec Hoag, a pimp who stole from his prostitute wife's customers while they were "distracted" with her. He was caught, but bribed police to stay free. He became so successful that he felt he didn't have to bribe police anymore, at which point he was arrested.
X0GQ8 TIL about the iridium anomaly, an unusual abundance of iridium in the Earth's rock layers which are 66 million years old. This suggest that the extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs was caused by a meteorite impact, as iridium is much more abundant in meteorites than it is on Earth.
KN59 TIL in the 1980s, India released 25,000 flesh-eating turtles into the Ganges river in an attempt to clean up corpse-pollution. The turtles were raised on dead fish so they wouldn’t develop a taste for the living, as they ate mostly everything. The $32M plan failed due to corruption and mismanagement
5YpLB TIL that there is a global Sand crisis and that there is an actual Sand mafia.