/r/todayilearned
TIL the largest and most expensive animatronic Disney developed, the Yeti in "Expedition Everest," is stuck in stationary mode as the cement supporting the Yeti isn't perfect and Disney doesn't want to risk the animatronic moving and falling on guests.
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TIL that despite the popular belief that women weren't allowed to watch the ancient Olympics because the athletes competed naked, only married women couldn't actually attend the competition. Unmarried women were welcome and the priestess of Demeter even had a privileged spot
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TIL Jeff Koons' studio resembles an art factory. He doesn't do the sculpting or much of the painting in his artwork. It's his ideas & standards but artisans do the labor. In 2019, his stainless steel inflatable rabbit resold for $91 million; highest ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist
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TIL Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher, would regularly walk around the city during bombing raids to "ponder his destiny". During one such aerial bombardment in 1945, a shell fragment damaged his spinal cord and he became paralysed from the waist down, remaining so for the rest of his life.
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TIL Poon Lim survived 133 days afloat in the Pacific Ocean aboard an 8' square wooden raft. When rescued and told that no one had ever survived longer on a raft at sea, he simply answered, "I hope no one will ever have to break that record."
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TIL that in 1940 the Germans conquered Denmark so quickly that the Danes didn't have time to formally declare war against them. They surrendered after 2 hours.
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TIL over 20 million people were killed in Chinese Islamic insurgency in 1860s and 1870s under Qing dysnasty, one province lost 14 million and the neighboring province 6 million
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TIL the congressional page program was shut down due in part from congressmen soliciting sex from them
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TIL Douglas Adams came up with the idea for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field holding a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe.
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