› added 7 years ago

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TIL that a 1996 federal law allows restaurants to donate leftover food without getting sued, and that nobody has ever filed a lawsuit against a restaurant over donated leftovers

m1VRE TIL Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest despite him having zero connection to the mountain (he never even saw it) and against his own wishes. He objected to the naming on the grounds that "Everest" could not be easily written in Hindi nor pronounced by the local people.
e0jVk TIL in 1997 BBC TV soap EastEnders broadcast episodes set in Ireland, which were criticised for negatively stereotyping the Irish as dirty, rude, poor and drunk. Complaints were upheld by the British Broadcasting Standards Commission and the BBC apologised for the episodes
loKg5 TIL that in 1982, the comic strip The Far Side jokingly referred to the set of spikes on a Stegosaurus's tail as a "thagomizer". A paleontologist who read the comic realized there wasn't any official name for the spikes and began using the new word; Thagomizer is now the generally accepted term.
d8Rw8 TIL Studio Directors knew to film John Wayne’s scenes before noon, because by the afternoon he was a ‘real mean drunk’.
pvKO TIL Apollo 14 commander Alan Shephard once said “If somebody’d said before the flight, ‘Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the Moon?’ I would have say, 'No, no way.’ But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”