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TIL The dictator of Burma (Myanmar) was obsessed with numerology. He removed 50 Kyat and 100 Kyat banknotes from circulation. Replaced them with 45 Kyat and 90 Kyat banknotes. The economic instability which followed led to a coup d'êtát in 1988.

b9WQ7 TIL The second person to survive going over Niagra falls in a barrel, Bobby Leach, later died after slipping on an orange peel
8aKgb TIL Quarantine is from Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning "forty days", used in 14th-15th-century Venetian dialect and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic
4Pab TIL in 2000, when the cast of “Friends” wouldn’t come down from their $1,050,000/episode salary demands, NBC produced promos saying “You’ve loved them for seven years, see how it all ends with the series finale of Friends this Thursday”. The cast agreed to lower salaries.
bdVa TIL that NBA player Shaquille O'Neal starred in ‘Kazaam’ (1996) because “I was a medium-level juvenile delinquent from Newark who always dreamed about doing a movie. Someone said, 'Hey, here’s $7 million, come in and do this genie movie.’ What am I going to say, no? So I did it.”
4X4mR TIL while animating Ratatoullie, a Pixar employee jumped into a pool while wearing a chef's outfit and hat to determine how it would cling to a character's body and what parts would become translucent.