Stephen Spignesi - #TIL: Today I Learned: Hilarious, Entertaining, and Educational Trivia

Copyright 2020 by Stephen Spignesi

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Kai Texel

Cover illustration by Getty Images

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5551-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5552-9

Printed in the United States of America

#TIL

Today I Learned

This is for Rachel Montgomery,
uno dei miei pi cari amici.

Pal, you got skills.

Ancora imparo.
I am still learning.

Michelangelo

Lapprendimento non esaurisce mai la mente.
Learning never exhausts the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

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10 OBSERVATIONS
ABOUT LEARNING

Anyone who stops learning is old,
whether at twenty or eighty.

Henry Ford

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought
for with ardor and attended to with diligence.

Abigail Adams

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.

Benjamin Franklin

Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi

Leadership and learning are
indispensable to each other.

John F. Kennedy

He who learns but does not think, is lost!
He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger!

Confucius

A man only learns in two ways. One, by reading,
and the other by association with smarter people.

Will Rogers

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much,
are the three pillars of learning.

Benjamin Disraeli

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from
listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Ernest Hemingway

You're always learning. The problem is, sometimes
you stop and think you understand the world. This
is not correct. The world is always moving. You never
reach the point you can stop making an effort.

Paulo Coelho

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INTRODUCTION

A Matter of Fact

We hope this book provides exactly what the subtitle says: facts and trivia that are funny, entertaining, and educational.

Ive been a full-time writer since the mid-eighties, but I also spent a decade teaching composition and literature to first year college students. In the end, they taught me. They taught me how to provide information that they would enjoy learning, and ultimately remember and use in their education and their lives.

This was not, and is not an easy task. Attention spans today are short. In fact, theyre really short. If you dont capture the reader, listener, watcher almost immediately, they will, my friend, move on.

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The longest entry in this book is just over 150 words. The briefest, a single sentence of a fewer than a dozen words.

Our plan? You find the entries in this tome funny, entertaining, and educational... as well as the perfect antidote for a short attention span. So, onward, and may the facts be with you!

Stephen Spignesi
New Haven, CT
September 2, 2019

CONTENTS

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500 #TIL FACTOIDS

#TIL 1. American writer Stephen King was almost killed on June 20, 1999 when a Maine man named Bryan Smith struck him with his van as King was walking alongside a Maine road. King was reading a book while walking (The Store by Bentley Little), something he was known to do. King needed multiple surgeries and full recovery took years. Since Stephen King is a writer known for horror novels, some people were not surprised when it was learned that Bryan Smith died in 2000 of a Fentanyl drug overdose on September 21. Why? September 21, 2000 was Stephen Kings 53rd birthday.

#TIL 2. The word CLUB in Club Sandwich sandwich does not stand for chicken lettuce under bacon. Its called a Club Sandwich because it was first served in a club.

#TIL 3. The Paris Catacombs, which date from 1774, hold the bones of more than six million people and are a popular tourist attraction, even though the walls are lined with skulls.

#TIL 4. Emily Dickinson wrote close to 1,800 meticulously constructed, lyrical, thematically-specific poems, often using slant rhyme and unconventional grammatical and punctuational elements, while suffering from headaches, iritis, nausea, blackouts, anxiety disorder, severe hypertension, heart failure, bipolar disorder, possible depression, and possible agoraphobia.

#TIL 5. Russia censored the 2019 Elton John movie Rocketman before allowing it to be shown in the country. They edited out a gay sex scene and the end text scene which reported that Elton was happily married to David Furnish and that they were raising two sons. Elton spoke out against the censoring.

#TIL 6. America has already had a gay president: James Buchanan, our fifteenth president. Buchanan had a twenty-three-year friendship with the only never-married vice president William Rufus King. (King was VP under Franklin Pierce.) Buchanan and King were referred to by the media as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy. In a letter to a confidante dated May 13, 1844, Buchanan wrote about his life after King moved to Paris to become the American ambassador to France: I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.