› added 4 years ago

108

TIL "area codes" for telephone numbers were originally called "STD codes"

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4kyn5 TIL that in the Seychelles, over 10% of the population are frequent users of heroin, one of the highest rates in the world.
vPN4K TIL Paul McCartney reached out to victims of the Lac-Megantic train disaster and gave free tickets to his Quebec City show to survivors two weeks after the incident. 47 people were killed from the explosion and about 2,000 people were forced to flee the area
e0x9D TIL Rod Stirling wrote the screenplay for Planet Of The Apes. The twist ending came from a woman he met at a party who pitched him the "it was earth all along" plot as a Twilight Zone episode. He paid her $500 for the idea.
nWo7r TIL Steve Harwell, singer of Smash Mouth, was originally a rapper in a Public-Enemy-inspired rap group, but abandoned the project after he heard Dr Dre's The Chronic and realised that the genre was changing.
7rdYZ TIL: The famous WWII Battle of the Bulge was so named because the German western front in Europe had a pronounced bulge (~70 x 50 miles) into Belgium. The Allies attacked the flanks of the bulge and eventually secured victory at a cost of more than 90,000 casualities