TIL that in the movie Matilda (1996), the famous scene where Miss Trunchbull swings a student by her pigtails was filmed without CGI. The child actress was secured in a harness and lifted by a crane,
TIL that Charles Guiteau, later killer of President James Garfield, was so despised by female members of the Oneida Community that they pejoratively named him "Charles Gitout". The Oneida Community wa
TIL Peter Sellers was originally supposed to play Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove (1964), but dropped out because he couldn't convincingly perform the required Texas accent and was afraid of heights. Th
TIL that Polandball (AKA Countryball) comics were originally created to troll a specific Polish user on the imageboard Krautchan. The Polish user’s name was Wojak, and he is the origin of the Wojak me
TIL in the first century CE an ancient Korean king liked to use his subjects as human furniture to sit on or lie on and would kill them if they moved. One attended became fearful and killed him with a
TIL the US Federal Government banned the sale of sliced bread as a Wartime Rationing Measure in Jan. 1943. It was argued to conserve wax paper and steel needed for replacement bread slicing blades. Th
TIL The decision to allow imports of Argentinian Beef to the United States came in 2015 after nearly 90 consecutive years of it being banned due to foot & mouth disease
TIL that Dutch employers must keep paying sick employees for up to 2 years, at least 70% of their salary, often topped up to 100% for the first year by collective agreements.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026: Awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
TIL the narration in Arrested Development was a way to let the writers fit in all the jokes they wanted. By leaving the exposition to the narrator, the characters could jump directly to the funny part
TIL some variable giant stars like Betelgeuse don't have perfectly spherical surfaces. Their internal convection mechanisms cause plasma to rapidly rise to and fall from their surfaces, which causes t
TIL about 'boustrophedon', a writing system where you alternate writing left-to-right and right-to-left each line. Only one modern script, Avoiuli, still uses it.
TIL the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest asks participants to create the worst possible opening line for a novel. The winner for 2024 was "She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-
TIL female warriors were fairly common in Japanese history. Many were trained in warfare, participated in battles, led troops and there were units consisting of only women. This declined around the 17
TIL the Olympic Games used to be strictly amateur-only. Abusing this, the Soviet Union would enter athletes who were nominally working in some profession, but in reality were all paid to train on a fu
TIL Napoleon Bonaparte was considered a notorious germaphobe for the time, taking long baths and extensively grooming himself daily, as well as attemping to mask bad smells around him with cologne on
TIL there's an orchid species known only from a single watercolour painted in 1823. Botanists named it in 1996 from the painting alone, nobody has found the plant since, and it's still listed as prote
TIL that barber-surgeons - who also cut hair and shaved people - performed major surgeries like amputations, and in the 18th century the survival rate for these operations was only around 25-40%
