You can actually get this little piece of trivia by hovering your cursor over this xkcd comic.
The day after they lost the NBA Championship, the Miami Herald ran an ad congratulating the Miami Heat for winning!
In fact, the ad from Macy’s selling Heat championship memorabilia saying “Congratulations Miami” ran on the same page as a story describing how the Heat lost to the Dallas Mavericks. A representative from the Herald explained that it is common practice for newspapers to prepare ads like these (ones based on the outcome of sporting events) ahead of time, just to cover their bases. This way, the ads can come out on time, instead of waiting for the game to be over before they start working on it. In this case, the ad went out on accident. Still, even if the Heat did win on Sunday, they still would have needed to win another game to clinch the title.
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English is the official language of air travel, thanks to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization. As of 2008, pilots and air traffic controllers are required to speak English, no matter what part of the world they are in. Since hundreds of lives have been lost in crashes attributed to communication problems between pilots and air traffic controllers or pilots and other pilots, it was determined that they all speak one standard language.
For example: 349 passengers died in a midair collision when a Saudi pilot and an Uzbek pilot failed to understand each other. 159 passengers on an American Airlines flight died when the pilot couldn’t understand an air traffic controller in Colombia.
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Some awesome lists!
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Waylon Smithers from The Simpsons was originally black!
Montgomery Burns’ closeted assistant first appeared visually in the show’s third episode, “Homer’s Odyssey”, though his voice can be heard over a loudspeaker in the series premiere. For his initial appearance, Smithers was accidentally given the wrong skin color, so he ended up being African-American instead of white! Director David Silverman asserts that Smithers was always intended to be “Mr. Burns’ white sycophant” (a sycophant is an obsessive flatterer), plus his team agreed that having a black character in a position of subservience would not have been the best idea. Therefore, Smithers’ skin was changed to its proper yellow tone.
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