› added 2 years ago

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TIL that Swiss Balloonist, Auguste Piccard, was the inspiration for both Professor Calculus, in the Tintin comics, and that Gene Roddenberry named Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek after him.

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V984 TIL On August 31, 1986, five-year-old Levan Merritt fell into the gorilla enclosure and lost consciousness. Jambo stood guard over the boy when he was unconscious, placing himself between the boy and other gorillas in what ethologists analyze as a protective gesture.
9YNkG TIL Tom Hanks agreed to play Mario in the the ‘now infamous’ live action movie “Super Mario Bros”. However, studio executives turned him down because they were worried he couldn’t handle the film’s more dramatic elements. (Clip starts at 4:26)
rRgw0 TIL that the royalties for The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" now go to its songwriter Richard Ashcroft, after Mick Jagger and Keith Richards finally agreed in 2019 to grant him authorship of the song and all the future royalties it generates.
OroY TIL 1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer” after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Crop failure forced Joseph Smith to leave Vermont, and his journeys resulted in “The Book of Mormon,” the dreary rain in Switzerland drove Mary Shelley to stay indoors, where she wrote “Frankenstein.”
lQGG TIL that the Kingdom of Hawaii declared itself neutral during the American Civil War. Despite that decree, many native Hawaiians enlisted anyway.