› added 11 years ago

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TIL: The Guinness Book of Records was created because the director of the Guinness Breweries got in an argument over what was Europe’s fastest game bird while hunting, and thought that there must be other questions debated nightly in pubs throughout Ireland. It was originally a marketing giveaway.

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B4Zd TIL Ghost Busters Dan Aykroyd is slightly autistic. His obsession with the police and ghost hunters was the inspiration for Ghost Busters. He was diagnosed with autism back in the 1980s when his wife asked him to get it checked out. He also had Tourette’s as a kid, but overcame it with therapy.
QJ0o6 TIL there is a gag gift called "liquid ass" that smells so badly the US military uses it for hyper-realistic combat training for medics to experience corpses or individuals with severe abdominal injuries
Lamp TIL Beethoven was once challenged to an improvisation contest by a famous pianist named Daniel Steibelt, Beethoven took the piece Steibelt’s music was written on, turned it upside down, played it, then improvised on that and mocked Daniel through his own music. Daniel left halfway through.
x8Ro TIL in New Zealand, you can legally own any firearm you want with a few exceptions and their number of gun deaths have been below 100/year since 1992.
5YXJD TIL that yellow fever came to the Americas aboard slave ships. Two hundred years later, it helped end slavery in Haiti. An epidemic broke out during the Haitian Revolution, killing two thirds of the French army and almost none of the slaves, and France was forced to surrender the island.