› added 10 months ago

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Today I learned: That just 2 months after 9/11, another commercial airliner, American Airlines Flight 587, crashed into a NYC neighborhood in Queens after a critical mechanical/piloting failure just minutes after take off. 265 people were killed and several homes were completely destroyed.

Read more abc7ny.com

via reddit.com

nW0Jd TIL that a common complaint among test audiences for Good Night and Good Luck was that the actor playing Joseph McCarthy was too over the top, not realizing the film used actual archival footage of McCarthy himself
X09vR TIL the first use of the word "hashish" is in a pamphlet published in Cairo in 1123 CE, calling Nizari Muslims "hashish-eaters". The cult of Nizari militants which arose after the fall of the Fatimid Caliphate is known as the Order of Assassins—a corruption of hashishin, Arabic for "hashish-smoker."
xl4g TIL the 1904 Olympic marathon ‘winner’ cheated by using a car, the second place finisher drank brandy mixed with rat poison, another athlete was chased off course by dogs, and another ate a rotten apple during the run.
VM1BB TIL the USSR had a televised song contest. Since few people had phones, viewers would turn their house lights on if they liked a certain song, off if they didn’t. The state energy company recorded the size of each power spike & reported results to the station to determine votes for each contestant.
wL9dM TIL In 1997, an American co., RiceTec obtained a patent for a strain of rice never historically grown in America — “Basmati”. They achieved this by crossbreeding India’s native plant with a US long rice variety & then claimed exclusive rights over any basmati hybrid grown in the western hemisphere.