NFL cheerleaders only make $50 a game!

While it's easy to think that NFL cheerleaders are rich, and glamorous and have affairs with NFL players. However it's far from the truth. The average cheerleader makes between $50 and $75 per game. You might say: "well, but at least they get to hang out with NFL stars, I'm sure a few get married to them." You'd be wrong. In fact, they're forbidden from socializing with the players!

They can make extra money by participating in paid public appearances, but they have to be approved by their coordinator. Some cheerleaders make a career of all the attention they get though. Teri Hatcher used to be a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49s before she jumped on to make hit TV shows like "Lois and Clark" and "Desperate Housewives."

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The Pink Triangle was originally a Nazi symbol!

It's the second most popular gay pride symbol, after the rainbow flag. While it's meant to show pride and as a fight for gay rights, it has a very bloody origin. The triangle, used upside down, was used in Nazi concentration camps as a badge to identify male prisoners that were sent there because they were homosexual. 

While it was originally intended as a badge of shame, the gay rights movement reclaimed it, inverted its direction and made it become one of the biggest symbols of the movement!

Read more on it here 

The original Nintendo came with a Robot!

When the video game industry crashed in 1983, many people thought that it would never recover again. A few years later, when Nintendo was ready to launch their first console, they got a lot of pushback from retailers that didn't want to carry a video game console.

Nintendo's solution was to tell them that the NES was not a video game console, but rather a toy. In order to demonstrate this idea they came up with R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy). It was an accessory that came with the NES and would play games along with the player. R.O.B. was a huge failure with gamers, because it didn't work that well and wasn't really that exciting. However, it was extremely succesful in that it helped the original Nintendo get started in the US market. This led to the NES reinvigorating the video game industry and helped it get to where it is today.

R.O.B. was soon discontinued. Since it has made appearances in later Nintendo games like F-Zero GX and Super Smash Bros Brawl.

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Banzai skydivers jump out of the plane without a parachute!

As if jumping out of a plane wasn't enough thrill, there's a new trend in Japan where people jump out of an airplane without having a parachute!

It's called Banzai Skydiving. What they do is parachuters throw the parachute out of the airplane first, then dive after it! Their hope is that they can catch it, put it on and pull the parachute before they die. 

This dangerous sport was highlighted as one of the crazy things people do to get on the Guinness World Records. The editor decided to keep it in. The Guinness World Records will reject records that endanger people other than the record setter. They decided that this only endangered the parachuter. 

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Tron was denied a Special FX Oscar because it used computer graphics!

The original 1982 Tron was a very influential film. It's one of the first films to use computer generated graphics to tell its story. It has influenced people like John Lasseter (creator of Toy Story) and Daft Punk. It's considered to be one of the top 20 cult films of all time. 

The Motion Picture Academy showed incredible short-sightedness when it came to Oscar time. While the movie wasn't considered particularly good outside the special effects, many people thought it deserved a nomination (and a win) for it's effects. However, the Motion Picture Academy REFUSED to nominate it. The movie's director later said that "The Academy thought we were cheating by using computers." 

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