TIL test audiences didn't like the original ending of Fatal Attraction because Glenn Close's character framed Michael Douglas' character for murder & took her own life. They wanted her to get what "she deserved." Director Adrian Lyne reportedly only agreed to film a new ending when paid $1.5 million

TIL the biggest lottery scam in US history was done by Eddie Tipton, head of the Multi-State Lottery Association's IT security. He felt underappeciated & overworked, so he wrote code that narrowed his odds from 5 million to 1 to 200 to 1. He won drawings in five states worth $24m before his arrest.

TIL Robert Taylor popularized hand soap from a pump when his company introduced Softsoap in 1978. To forestall competition from larger companies, he ordered 100 million pumps from the only existing US manufacturers. The $12 million buy prevented the giants from matching his product for over a year.

TIL Emily Rosa at age nine became the youngest person to have a research paper published in a peer reviewed medical journal. She devised a single-blind protocol to determine if therapeutic touch practitioners could actually detect "human energy fields." She found they were right only 44% of the time

GRRM has seen all six episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (last two in rough cut) and said he loved them. "It’s as faithful as adaptation as a reasonable man could hope for (and you all know how increedibly reasonable I am on that particular subject)."

TIL a 1896 study found that 90% of all commercial ketchups contained “injurious ingredients” that could lead to death. So "at a time when no one else cared" Henry Heinz was obsessed with making products as pure as possible. His see-through bottles were a design statement: purity through transparency

The second season of Rings of Power was down 60% in total minutes watched compared to Season 1

TIL in 2010 a doctor and his son just happened to be walking by an apartment building in Paris when a 15-month-old boy fell 80ft (24m) from a seventh floor balcony before bouncing off a cafe awning into the doctor's arms. His catch helped the boy escape "miraculously without a single scratch."

TIL the first known instance of a storm chaser or meteorologist killed by a tornado occurred in 2013 when Tim Samaras, his son Paul, & Carl Young were killed near El Reno, OK by the widest tornado ever recorded. It expanded from 1 mile to 2.6 miles wide in about 30 seconds as it closed in on them.

TIL Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) is the most expensive independent film ever made with a production budget of around $180 million. Although it grossed $226 million worldwide, it was considered a box-office bomb due to its high production and advertising costs.

TIL in 2020 a woman took an online DNA test which showed a 22% match with a man who she'd eventually discover to be her still alive uncle, who was kidnapped in 1951 at the age of six & had been missing for 70 years. After he was abducted in Oakland, he was flown to the east coast & raised there.

TIL there were just 5 surviving longbows from medieval England known to exist before 137 whole longbows (and 3,500 arrows) were recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1980 (a ship of Henry VIII's navy that capsized in 1545). The bows were in excellent finished condition & have been preserved.

TIL in 1982 a crew of five sailing from Maine to Florida ran into a storm with 30-foot waves which capsized their boat. Over the next five days, two of them became delirious after drinking saltwater and walked off the dinghy into many awaiting sharks. Infection killed a third, leaving two survivors.

TIL in 2013 a woman went to pick up a friend in Brussels (less than 90 miles from her home), however because of a GPS error, she ended up in Croatia after driving 900 miles across five international borders. She realized she took a wrong turn two days after leaving. Her son had reported her missing.

TIL in 1993 Donald Wyman amputated his left leg below the knee with a pocket knife after it got stuck under a large tree during a logging accident where he bled profusely for an hour & feared he'd die. However, he was even able to keep his leg after firefighters retrieved it & surgeons reattached it

TIL Joel Tenenbaum was successfully sued by the major music labels for illegally downloading and sharing 30 of their songs. A jury ordered him to pay $675,000 (or $22,000 per song), which led to him file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2015, with a judge discharging the $675,000 judgment in 2016.

TIL the during The Battle of the Bulge, German troops posing as American soldiers were caught because their identification cards were spelled correctly.

TIL when David Lynch was asked by fans for clues or answers regarding one of his films, he'd typically refuse; however when fans in France asked him for clues to help them decipher Mulholland Drive (2001), he gave them 10. "I thought the clues were only going to exist in France & then..the internet"

TIL every person who has become a centibillionaire (a net worth of usually $100 billion, €100 billion, or £100 billion), first became one in 2017 or later except for Bill Gates who first reached the threshold in 1999.

TIL in 2010 Sam Ballard was drinking with several friends when he was dared to eat a slug that had begun to crawl across his friend's concrete patio. After he ate it, he'd find out the infected slug had given him rat lungworm disease, which put him into a year-long coma & ultimately took his life.

TIL Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook for a job in 2009. And that same year, he & Jan Koum "took a chance" and co-founded WhatsApp together. Then in 2014 after amassing 450 million global users, they sold WhatsApp to Facebook in a deal that reportedly made both of them a multi-billionaire.

TIL in 2000 a Mexican woman performed an hour-long C-section on herself with a kitchen knife after 12 hours of constant pain. After 3 attempts to cut open her abdomen, she made a 17cm vertical incision (a typical one is 10cm & horizontal). But despite no medical training, both mom & child survived.

TIL The Marvels (2023) has the biggest estimated nominal loss for a movie at $237 million.

TIL James Cameron voluntarily gave up his points (a percentage of the film's income) and salary for Titanic when its budget exceeded his original estimation to the studio (it went from $100-120m to $200m). He didn't want the studio execs to think he had lied to them in order to get the movie made.

TIL US adults bought more toys for themselves than for any other age group in the first quarter of 2024 for the first time ever, surpassing the historically-dominant preschooler (three-to five-year-olds) market. Up to 43% of adults had purchased a toy for themselves in the past year.