› added 12 years ago

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TIL the first assassination attempt on a US President happened today in 1835, thwarted by 2 jammed guns. Andrew Jackson beat the crap out of his failed assassin with the help of (The) Davy Crockett.

BgE8L TIL that Michael Caine is a Korean War veteran
Wyk8 TIL that in 2004 Volvo unveiled a concept car “for women, by women” without a hood because “their target audience doesn’t need to look under the hood.”
MeA1A TIL of Hellfire Clubs, 18th century social clubs, extant in UK, where men and women gathered to perform socially unacceptable actions while simultaneously mocking religion, satirically, in a time when it was blasphemous to do so.
KOO7Q Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup. Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.
Wk9ZY Today I learned Shia LaBeouf was so unpopular on the set of Fury for his antics (face cutting, tooth pulling, not washing to get into character) he was installed in a bed and breakfast away from the rest of the cast during filming