› added 11 years ago

205

TIL that Robert Downey Jr. finally quit drugs in 2003 when his new girlfriend (now wife) gave him an ultimatum. She is unofficially known around Hollywood as the Miracle That Saved Robert Downey Jr.

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NXrOM Today I learned that early versions of the periodic table included a material called didymium as an element. It was later discovered that didymium was actually an alloy of praseodymium and neodymium.
VBABB TIL that St Christopher was often depicted in Byzantine icons as having the head of a dog, this is speculated to be due to a misreading of the Latin description of him being Cananeus or Canaanite as caninus, ie canine
b6rYE TIL about "Refrigerator Women", a trope in fiction where a female character is killed or seriously injured as a plot device to motivate the male characters, an example of which being the death of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) at the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2
81AP TIL in the Breaking Bad episode ‘Ozymandias’, Holly crying out 'Mama’ was not scripted. The baby playing Holly saw her mother standing off-camera and Bryan Cranston played along with it.
eJRE TIL that after shooting down an American F-117 stealth attack aircraft in 1999, Serbian propaganda posters read “Sorry, we didn’t know it was invisible”