"TIL in an effort to protect her son and daughter from falling under the sinister charms of Charles Manson, Angela Lansbury relocated her family from LA to Ireland. Describing Ireland as “free from bad influences”, she then refused work to better support their recovery from heroin addiction."
"TIL Marjoe Gortner is an Evangelical preacher who decided to pull the curtain back on the scams he and other preachers used. He invited a crew to film behind the scenes as he revealed tricks of the trade and the sacks full of cash he earned nightly. It won the '72 Academy Award Best Documentary."
"TIL Abraham Lincoln signed the bill creating the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day he was assassinated."
"TIL Wheat and Barley were ancient Egyptian pregnancy tests. A woman would urinate on bags of barley and wheat and if they sprouted, she was likely pregnant. A 1963 study found that this was accurate ~70% of the time."
"TIL the car coordinator of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood managed to locate the exact 1959 Ford driven by the Manson Family, but a replica was used instead because the idea of having the real Manson car was considered too creepy."
"TIL the vocals for the Gnarls Barley song "Crazy" (2006) were recorded in one take. Not only that, it was the first time singer CeeLo Green ever tried singing the lyrics. The song topped the charts in many countries and peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100."
"TIL about bank robber and kidnapper Vassilis Palaiokostas who is known as the "Greek Robin Hood" for giving away most of his stolen millions to the poor. He escaped by helicopter from the same maximum security prison twice while serving a 25 year sentence and remains at large despite a €1m bounty."
"TIL TGI Fridays stopped requiring employees to wear flair after Office Space came out and customers began making jokes about the flair."
"TIL Boeing built an entire fake town on top of their Seattle area factory during WW2."
"TIL that Ticketmaster was caught recruiting resellers to scalp its own tickets."
"TIL that US Navy sailor's love of ice cream in world war II was so great that in 1943 the navy purchased an 'ice cream barge' to act as a mobile ice cream making factory for sailors and marines. The barge was capable of producing 10 gallons of ice cream every 7 minutes."
"TIL Emperor Hirohito of Japan was given the original print of the Disney short Lambert the Sheepish Lion, after it was learned it was his favourite Disney film."
"TIL that during the looting of the Chinese imperial palace at the end of the 2nd Opium War, the British soldiers took a Pekingese dog to gift to Queen Victoria. She named it "Looty"."
"TIL World War II codebreaker Dilly Knox used to solve coded enemy messages in the bathtub and persuaded his superiors to have a bathtub installed in his office in the cryptanalysis section of the British Admiralty."
"TIL Physiologist Giles Brindley, in 1983 presented his treatment for erectile disfunction by injecting himself before his talk and dropping his pants to show the crowd of urologists."
"TIL Mel Gibson originally intended for The Passion of the Christ to have no subtitles, despite the film being entirely in Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic."
"TIL that there was a 60s band named Nirvana that tried to sue the 90s band for having the same name as them. They wanted to cover them after that, but the project was scrapped due to Kurt Cobains death."
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