› added 7 years ago

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TIL when NBC decided to air 'The Office' after the Super Bowl, execs encouraged the show's producers to cast celebrity guest stars. They booked Jack Black, Jessica Alba, and Cloris Leachman but instead of writing them in with the regular cast, they stared in a fake movie the cast watched.

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R7rg1 TIL King Richard the Lionheart of England forgave and freed his killer, a young French boy whose father and brothers had been killed by Richard; the boy said he shot Richard with a crossbow as revenge, and Richard was so impressed with his bravery that he sent him off with 100 shillings
l6Xr TIL Judit Polgár, the strongest female chess player of all time, was part of an education experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age
l7N9A TIL the US Postal Service has a podcast and they cover True Crime stories such as their investigation into Patrice Runner, a fake psychic who impersonated an also fake but real European psychic to con people out of $175 million in several countries.
mx5GY TIL if you're ordering and paying for extra ingredients at an U.S. restaurant you're paying on the average a 426% mark-up for extra sour cream, 417% for cheese on a burger, and 525% for any ingredients on a pizza. An unidentified pizza chain has a 636% mark up for meat in their "meat-laden" pizza.
pY7wQ TIL about the "information-to-action ratio," a postulate that explains how access to more information actually hinders our ability to prioritize information we can act upon.