TIL Martin Landau had a brief career as a comic strip artist before going into acting.
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/l/landau_martin.htm
TIL that when Christopher Mintz-Plasse filmed Superbad, his mother was required by law to be on set during his sex scene as he was still a minor at the time.
TIL that after releasing two albums that flopped, Neil Young was sued by his label, Geffen Records, for releasing music with so little commercial appeal that it was "unrepresentative" of himself. After the lawsuit, he released two more albums on the same label, leading to lowest sales in his career.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young
TIL Barbie was inspired by an escorte cartoon and adult toy
TIL Luke Perry's character on Beverly Hills 90210, Dylan McKay, was named after Matt Dillon. The character is similar to Matt Dillon's portrayal of Dallas Winston in "The Outsiders" (1983)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_2a898q3ck&t=2185s
TIL in the 1920s Fiat had a 1/2 mile race track built on the roof of their factory
https://kottke.org/21/09/fiats-rooftop-racetrack
TIL all foreign and domestic students can study for free at public German universities regardless of what country you're from!
TIL Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company. They didn’t make their first video game until 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo
TIL fixed position street lights were first used around 500BC Beijing, using bamboo and naturally-occurring gas vents
https://www.brandonindustries.com/the-history-of-street-lights-from-fire-to-led-lamp-posts/
TIL in the 1980s a man with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder shot himself in the head in an attempt to commit suicide - Instead of killing him, the bullet destroyed the part of his brain that was responsible for his OCD, and he went on to become a straight-A college student five years later
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-02-23-mn-44736-story.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/152owfq/til_in_the_1980s_a_man_with_severe/
TIL that a 2017 study of 2,000 British adults concluded that "Condescending Wonka" was their all-time favorite meme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condescending_Wonka
TIL all the main voice actors in The Simpsons make the same amount of money as one another
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons
TIL that the guy who invented the sewing machine had 26 kids with two wives and three mistresses. After he was arrested for bigamy, he fled to England. When he died, his family split his $13M fortune, except for his son William who testified against him in his divorce. William inherited $500.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Singer
TIL that coffee cake doesn’t actually contain any caffeine; it just tastes good with a cup of coffee!
https://namelymarly.com/does-coffee-cake-have-caffeine/
TIL Jim Cramer of CNBC's Mad Money was one of the first people to cover the Ted Bundy murders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cramer#cite_ref-madman_8-1
TIL that the guy who was the face of "Dude you're getting a Dell" was fired after being found out of having weed and was kind of blacklisted from the acting industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4uwgzlDYDo
TIL The owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, was able to buy the team largely due to a prior owner’s financial difficulties due to financing a Jackson Five Tour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kraft
TIL that the spots some people see while looking at the blue sky is known as the "The Blue Field Entoptic Phenomenon" and is caused by white blood cells moving through the eye.
TIL Green Day bassist Mike Prichard adopted the stage name Mike Dirnt as "Dirnt" was originally a nickname that his friends from grade school gave him, as he constantly played "air bass/guitar" and made a "dirnt, dirnt, dirnt" noise while pretending to pluck the strings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dirnt
TIL To promote his new movie Lost in Space (1998), Matt LeBlanc appeared on three different talk shows (Live with Regis & Kathie Lee, The Rosie O'Donnell Show, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien), which all aired on the same day.
https://www.itsabouttv.com/2017/04/whats-on-tv-tuesday-april-7-1998.html
