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TIL Edgar Allan Poe, Named for His Cousin, Was the First College Football All-American Quarterback

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0wwVy TIL that 12,000 bears are farmed for their bile in Asia which is used in traditional Chinese medicine and generates $2bn per year. Farming always involves surgery on the bears to insert a catheter or to cut a hole through the abdomen by which the bile leaks. Bear bile has no medicinal effect.
jNErM TIL of Jim Shooter, a Comic Book writer who started writing comics at the age of 13 and sent them in to DC comics. The head of DC liked them so much that he immediately commissioned Shooter to write Superman stories. Shooter got a regular position at 14, working to support his struggling parents.
l7eJB TIL Cleopatra wasn’t just alluring; she was crafty too. So the myth goes, she made a grand entrance to impress Julius Caesar by having herself rolled up in a carpet and delivered to his quarters. When the carpet was unrolled, out she came, nude and irresistible.
4Xgeg TIL Georg Gärtner was the last German POW in America. He escaped from a camp in the U.S and took on a new identity. He was on the FBI’s most wanted list for 40 years, until he ‘surrendered’ on the Today Show. He was not charged as an illegal immigrant as he was brought to America against his will
5YeNR TIL That when fluoride was first introduced to American water supplies in the 1940s and 50s it was criticized as a Communist plot to socialize medicine and deplete the brain power of American children.