Today I found out the origin of the term “jackpot”. Jackpot originally popped up around the 1870s and was from the poker game “Jacks or Better”. This is much like traditional five card draw, except in this case, if a player does not have a pair of “jacks or better” in the first round of betting, he has to pass. […]
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It was the autumn of 1960 in Hamburg, Germany. The young, fledgling group who had recently changed their name officially to “The Beatles” were playing at a local club called The Kaiserkeller. Hamburg was a vice-ridden city, a 24-hour-a-day unofficial red light district in itself. Hookers, pimps, thugs, gangsters, drug dealers, and various sundry “characters” and habitues roamed the streets […]
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You might think the temporary insanity defense was a relatively new thing. I mean, maybe it began in the 1940s or possibly the ’30s. What with all the psychobabble around in those times. But, no. It was actually much earlier. It all started with a guy named Daniel Sickles. Sickles (1819-1914) was a U.S. Senator and later a Congressman, as […]
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It’s pretty obvious that no Major League Baseball player would be caught dead wearing a dress to the plate. But one batter wore one, and turned the at-bat into an outrageous incident that left fans hooting and hollering. Nightclub singer Kitty Burke hit a ball thrown by St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Paul “Daffy” Dean, becoming the only woman to ever […]
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Jesse asks: Why are the notes taken at a meeting called the “minutes”? Was this because the note taker records the notes along with the time? Not quite. In fact, the “minutes” here have nothing to do with time, but rather “small”, as in “minute” (my-newt). “Minutes” in this sense first popped up in the early 18th century, possibly directly […]
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Today I found out the “ye” as in “Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe” should be pronounced “the”. The “Ye” here is not the “ye” as in “Judge not, that ye (you) be not judged”, but is rather a remnant of the letter “thorn” or “þorn” (Þ, þ). The letter thorn was used in Old Norse, Old English-Middle English, Gothic, and Icelandic […]
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Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were, in my own humble opinion, the greatest comedy team in the history of show business. I like Laurel and Hardy very much; I love the Marx Brothers and I idolize the Three Stooges, but there was something so electric about Dean and Jerry. It was a new concept, a fresh idea, teaming up a […]
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As mentioned about a week and a half ago, starting today we’re going to be doing a lot more daily posts here on Today I Found Out than previously. We’ll still be doing the normal 5-6-ish full articles per week like always, but we’ll also be adding a few other posts daily and a variety of new series of posts […]
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Today I found out that all humans can be traced back to a single female known as Mitochondrial Eve. This woman is thought to be the “mother” of all humans alive today. Seems like a big claim for scientists to make. So how do they know this? The simple explanation is that when an egg is fertilized by a sperm, the […]
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Today I found out Sleeping Beauty is based on a story where a married king finds a girl asleep and can’t wake her, so rapes her instead. The story is called The Sun, the Moon, and Talia, written, or at the least collected and composed, by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile. It was published in 1634 in his “Pentamerone” collection […]
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Today I found out the Colossal Squid, which is the largest known squid in terms of mass on Earth, has a doughnut shaped brain with their esophagus running through the hole in the center. This hole through their brain isn’t very large at all with their esophagus diameter at just around 10 mm (.39 inches). Their brain itself isn’t that […]
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Today I found out the only victim of the Tacoma Narrows, “Galloping Gertie”, bridge collapse was a three legged dog. The three legged dog in question was a black Cocker Spaniel left in the back seat of the lone car abandoned on the galloping bridge. The dog was owned by reporter Leonard Coatsworth, though his wife stated in an interview […]
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One of the great things about baseball is that it’s amazing with how many games there are per season, even lifelong fans frequently see things during games that they’ve never seen happen before. With that in mind, here are a few of the stranger feats in Major League Baseball history that have only happened once to date: Pitching a no-hitter […]
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This post is sponsored by Chucker & Reibach Today I found out the first gas/electric hybrid vehicle was invented in 1900. While hybrid and electric cars are often touted by the media and automobile companies as the wave of the future, in fact, we’re more just re-hashing the wave of the past with them, but with updated technologies. Before gas […]
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Starting November 1st, we’ll be trying something a little different on Today I Found Out, more posts per day… a boatload more. We’ll still have the normal 5-6 regular article / infographic type posts per week that you’re used to, but in addition to that, we’ve been working extremely hard recently to be able to add a lot more other […]
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This is a guest post by Stacy Jameson Today I found out Hawaiian Punch was originally supposed to be used as an ice cream topping. The brand was originally “Leo’s Hawaiian Punch” sold under the company name Pacific Citrus Product Company. The recipe for the confectionery was created by Tom Yates, A.W. Leo, and Ralph Harrison in a garage in […]
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Today I found out where the expression “I for one welcome our new X overlords” came from. For those not familiar with this now popular funny meme, the basic idea is to substitute X with any perceived extremely powerful entity that it would be futile to resist. A somewhat recent example of this can be seen when Ken Jennings, after […]
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This is a guest post by Dan Lewis. Dan runs the wildly popular daily newsletter Now I Know (“Learn Something New Every Day, By Email”). To subscribe to his daily email, click here. Today I found out about the mass murdering warlord turned christian evangelist who was once known as General Butt Naked. Joshua Milton Blahyi, pictured above, is a […]
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