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TIL Texas has it’s own dialect of German, and it’s going extinct

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via reddit.com

5V5Er TIL a tradition in some of the Southern US is decorating trees with bottles. This custom was brought over by captured Africans and it has origins from the Kongo. One belief is that these captured evil spirits by luring them inside due to the attractive color of the bottles.
5VXLp TIL about Camp Century, a subsurface base built below Greenland by the US in the 1950s that was powered by a mobile nuclear reactor. The base had 21 tunnels almost 2 miles in length and was designed to withstand a nuclear strike
7rJ0b TIL until December '98, songs could not chart on the Billboard Hot 100 unless they were released as a single. This resulted in many well-known 90s songs (e.g. No Doubt's Don't Speak, Sugar Ray's Fly) being absent from the chart's history. Under current rules, they would have likely hit #1.
6xN8 TIL before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany Berlin had a period called the Golden Twenties. It was known for its leadership roles in science, the humanities, music, film, higher education, government, diplomacy, industries and military affairs.
LkVoQ TIL that between the 11th and 19th centuries, Buddhist monks in northern Japan practiced a kind of meditation called Sokushinbutsu, in which they would mummify themselves alive by slowly weaning themselves off food and water before eventually starving to death