Today I Learned 🎓

TIL that Otto von Habsburg, the pretender to the Austrian throne, offered to take over the Austrian government expressly to repel the Nazis This offer was declined and after Germany annexed Austria Otto was sentenced to death by the Nazi government. [Source]

TIL that “Crank That” by Soulja Boy was made on a cracked demo copy of music production software FL Studio (then known as Fruity Loops), with the song being written and recorded in only about ten minutes. Regardless, it topped the charts in the US and is an early example of digital sales succeeding. [Source]

TIL the top five selling games on the PS2 are all from either the Grand Theft Auto or Grand Turismo franchises. [Source]

TIL the term "final girl" was coined by Carol J. Clover in her article Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film. Clover noted that a girl is usually left to confront the killer, following a viewer shift from the killer's perspective to the final girl's perspective partway through the film. [Source]

TIL that China has a whole genre of tv and film based on the fictionalized experiences of concubines in the imperial harem. It’s known as gongdou ju or “palace intrigue dramas” in English. [Source]

TIL that famous quip "Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography" belongs to General Sir Charles Harington, who oversaw planting and detonation of enormous mines during the Battle of Messines - ranked among the largest non-nuclear explosions [Source]

TIL that bees get a positive charge from flying whilst flowers have negative charge from being grounded. This attracts pollen onto the bee but also turns the flowers briefly positive, meaning that other bees detect they’re currently empty. [Source]

TIL Only one NFL player has died on the field: Chuck Hughes in 1971. The game continued with a silent crowd [Source]

TIL that around 40% of cats lack the gene to get high from catnip [Source]

TIL Rizla rolling papers, still sold today, were first produced in 1660, and in 1796, Napoleon gave approval for Rizla papers to be distributed to his troops. [Source]

TIL the International Football Association Board, who set the laws of football used internationally, has just eight votes between all members: one each for the football associations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and four for the entirety of FIFA [Source]

TIL Apple has a patent for a pizza box [Source]

TIL that most of the people working on the monster movie "The Giant Claw" had no idea what the titular monster would look like. When lead actor Jeff Morrow saw the film for the first time in his hometown, the audience laughed so hard at the poorly designed prop that he walked out of the screening. [Source]

TIL that a Sherpa was presumed dead after being stranded at 7,500m on Everest. He survived six days without bottled oxygen or food, chewing ice and eating chocolate, then spent 2.5 days trapped in a crevasse. After escaping, he crawled toward Base Camp while his family prepared for his funeral. [Source]

TIL the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank 3 times in 6 months. The third & final time it sank occurred when it attacked & sank the USS Housatonic, a US Navy warship. The submarine was just 20 feet (6.1m) from the Housatonic, when its deployed torpedo exploded, which caused the submarine to sink [Source]

TIL that Dr. Robert Graves (the discoverer of Graves' disease) was once caught in a storm aboard a ship with failing bilge pumps. When the mutinous crew tried to abandon ship Graves holed the lifeboat with an axe, then repaired the pumps using leather from his own shoes. Everyone on board survived. [Source]

TIL for the first time, researchers observed mother leopard seals caring for their deceased offspring. This rare behavior is known as 'postmortem attentive behavior', or PAB. One mother seal attended to her pup's corpse for 20 days, which is one of the longest observed bouts of PAB ever recorded. [Source]

TIL popping candy is made by bubbling CO₂ through molten sugar at ~600 psi (≈41× atmospheric pressure), then cooling it under pressure. Tiny CO₂ bubbles remain trapped in the solid candy. In your mouth, saliva dissolves the sugar, releasing the pressurised gas and causing the pops [Source]