Reader’s Digest exposed me to a better vocabulary and knowing to always pack a flare gun incase my car carreens off the road, into a ditch and just out of sight of passer byers where I am left alone, trapped and in inclement conditions for days.
Nothing like Drama in Real Life to make you a little paranoid.
I owe a lot to Asterix.
Some years ago a superior and pretentious colleague was going on about ‘Lusophone Africa’. No one seemed to know what he was on about and none of us wanted to give him the satisfaction of asking. Thanks to those maps of the Roman empire in Asterix books I could draw on the knowledge that in Roman times Portugal was called Lusitania. Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa was what he should have really been saying.
I also know how the English really came to be a nation of tea drinkers. 
Classics Illustrated comic books, especially the Special Editions and The World Around Us series. I definitely learned more about the French Revolution and World War II from these than i ever did in school. They also had nifty issues on Prehistoric Life (two different issues!), Pirates, Holidays, Spies, and other stuff. I also found the regular literature-adapting Classics Illustrated issues pretty good introductions to literature. My mom borrowede my copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey to help her with her night coiurses.
Treasure Chest comics were great, too. Published by George A. Pflaum, they were “Catholic” comics distributed through catholic schools , rather than through newsstands. But they were never oppressively religious. The science and historty articles were really well done (they did a whole piece on the history of the toothbrush), and they did biographies, as well. They also had pretty good “continued stories” that ran as a serial throughout the year. Frank Borth was one of their regular artists, and his continued series “How to Draw” (later collected into a single issue) was the best introduction to perspective, composition, and proportion I ever had. (I later learned that Borth had been one of the artists responsible for the infamous “Phantom Lady” comics of the early 1950s. But for TC he drew wonderful bucloic “Spin and Marty”- type adventures.)
CI and TC aren’t around any more. God knows where kids are going to get their education from nowadays.
Oh yeah. I went through a stage in my childhood when I was certain that I would end up in the bowels of either a grizzly bear or a giant ocean sunfish, depending on where we decided to go for summer vacation that year.
How the hell did I forget MAD? There was a comic store across the street from my grammar school and I went in there very day and got a back issue or two (usually for a buck or two). Everything I know about ~1960-1980 I learned from the Usual Gang.
Spice Channel
Bullwinkle!
I’m so old that I remember when The Bullwinkle Show came on in prime time Sundays on NBC. In those days, there was only one TV in the house, and the family gathered around it. Fortunately, my mother and father thought the puns and popular culture references in Bullwinkle were hilarious, and they would watch the show with my sister and me. They explained to me about Lake Veronica, The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayam, Wossamata U., and dozens of other references. (I got the joke about the Kerwood Derby on my own!)
In one Dudley Do-Right episode, Snidley Whiplash invented a Dudley Do-Right robot that could say three things: “Yes sir, Inspector Fenwick!”; “Good morning, Nell!”; and “Oh it’s Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him, out the brute! But it’s savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot!” This made my parents howl with laughter, and they explained to me about Rudyard Kipling and the poem, “Tommy.” They then presented me with a copy of “The Jungle Book,” “Kim” and a volume of Kipling’s poetry. Thus was the statrt of a lifelong love of the work of Rudyard Kipling.
I learned about love in the back of a Dodge (the lesson hadn’t gone too far…)
I learned who James Ensor (famous Belgium painter) was from the They Might Be Giants song. Also, learned a bit about James K. Polk from them as well.
How to touch type and type 1 handed. - Quake 1.
When he heard I was going to university in London our aged local vicar taught me the secret of jaywalking.
No, I can’t tell you what it is, but I can divulge that you do need an umbrella to do it properly.
I learned some important fact about the Second World War from this song:
http://www.lyricsdownload.com/foetus-i-ll-met-you-in-poland-baby-lyrics.html
SUCK ON THIS, SQUAREHEAD
I hear you got a six inch guarantee of unilateral security
Well me and Stalin, we just signed a mutual non-aggression pact
I’m gonna put CASE WHITE into effect
Prepare yourself for a CONFLICT baby
I’ll cook you a stew you’ll choke on
I tore up the VERSAILLES TREATY
Today is the FIRST of SEPTEMBER
See you at your graveside, baby
I’ll meet you in Poland, baby
I learned about the Korean war…well, that it happened…from MAS*H. But I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I’ve learned a lot of foreign language words, and developed an intrigue of non-English languages, all from my Andrew Lloyd Webber cast CD collection. I think that I could have been quite the linguist if life hadn’t intervened.
I’ve also learned a bit about classical music from that other LW brother Julian.
The Simpsons!
There was an episode where Homer gets to ride on the Duff blimp. The pilot points out all the circular fields on the ground were created through central pivot irrigation.
I had always wondered how the farmers got the fields to be perfect circles like that!
Ditto. May I also suggest the more recent band The Artichoke? They are going to release an album here in the near future that has 26 songs, each dedicated to a different scientest. Good stuff.
I first learned the names of the Jazz Greats by listening to a Manhattan Transfer album.
I learned that time slows down as you approach the speed of light from Disney’s Flight of the Navigator. I was six.
I learned that brain cells don’t grow back from an episode of a Disney channel series called Danger Bay, when I was…god, I must have been four.
MST3k, indirectly, taught me how to type. (When you’re doing an online MSTing in a chatroom, ya’ gotta have fleet fingers.)
Classic Comics taught me the essentials of Mutiny on the Bounty and a couple other literary works that aren’t coming to mind right now.
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books taught me the importance of style in a novel. I read A Christmas Carol in the condensed version, and some years later, in the original. At that point I realized what I was missing, even though I had gotten all of the “story”.
I had my first exposure to Hamlet from listening to my mother’s copy of the soundtrack from the musical Hair.
I got interested in the Civil War by watching Ken Burns’s documentary miniseries, got interested in Scots and English history by reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and got interested in Renaissance history by attending the Renaissance faire. I’ve since fleshed out my historical knowledge of all these, plus developed an interest in WWII history through a combination of my father-in-law’s recollections and Eddie Izzard’s standup comedy.
A surprising percentage of historical romance novelists have an interest in or degrees in history. A regular reader tends to pick up all sorts of random knowledge about, say, the Battle of New Orleans.