/r/todayilearned
TIL-On Halloween 1974, 20th Century Fox released 'Phantom of the Paradise', a campy musical comedy lampooning the tropes and conventions of the horror genre. A year later, the same studio released 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show', another campy musical comedy lampooning the same tropes & conventions.
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TIL that during the 70s and 80s, dozens of fires were set off deliberately in Hoboken, which displaced thousands of mostly Hispanic residents and killed 56. Investigators suspected that they were started by landlords in arson for profit schemes in order to sell newly renovated apartments to yuppies.
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TIL a 1553 world map published by Petrus Apianus called North America "Baccalearum", meaning "realm of the Cod fish", in reference to the abundance of cod fish on the East Coast.
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TIL that Jack Butler Yeats, brother of poet W. B. Yeats, won a silver medal for Swimming in the 1924 Olympics - not for the sport, but for a painting titled "Swimming".
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TIL there is a satirical political party in Germany called “Die Partie” that has pledged to build a wall around Switzerland and to rebuild the Berlin Wall. They received 900,000 votes in the 2019 EU elections
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TIL that in its first appearance at the Olympics, Suriname was represented by a single athlete, a runner who missed his event for arriving late to the heat after being given wrong information about the time.
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TIL the biggest single prize ever captured during the Golden Age of Piracy was in 1721 by John Taylor & Olivier La Bouche. Their two pirate ships boarded the Portuguese treasure ship Nostra Senhora de Cabo which had £500K in valuables & general cargo worth £375K (a total of over $250 million today).
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TIL in order to end the My Lai Massacre, Hugh Thompson Jr. landed his helicopter between civilians and advancing American troops, ordering his own men to fire on any troops that would attack civilians. He was condemned and ostracized by the US military, government, and public.
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