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TIL of Chad Varah—a priest who started the first suicide hotline in 1953 after the first funeral he conducted early in his career was for a 14-year-old girl who took her own life after having no one to talk to when her first period came and believed she’d contracted an STD.

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wond1 TIL that Pope Gregory IX issued a Papal Bull declaring that cats bore Satan’s spirit, which subsequently led to huge numbers of cats being killed throughout Europe producing an indirect cause of the Bubonic plague spread by fleas on rats, which would otherwise have been hunted by the dead cats.
mNQy TIL that Jamaica is considered the most homophobic place on earth. Men are even afraid to seek treatment for HIV out of fear they will be associated with homosexuals.
aQNN TIL A German U-boat Captain improperly executed a toilet flush, leading to the sinking of his submarine.
neBLY TIL Paul McCartney was arrested in 1973 for “illegal cultivation” after police found him growing cannabis on his farm in England. He claimed the seeds were from a fan and that he didn’t know what they were.
v1LrR TIL that engineers at IBM had to hand weave their memory 14KB in total for both control and redundancy of their flight computer in the SATURN V launch vehicle. Wire shaped inside the mesh represented a bit based on the magnetic field generated by the direction of current flowing through it.