› added 3 months ago

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TIL that Donkey Kong Country was originally going to be "Donkey Kong vs. Super Wario." The plot would have had Wario stealing a time machine built by Mario and turning him to stone, so Donkey Kong had to save him. It was abandoned because Nintendo wanted brand-new villains.

9YR1M TIL the 6 year old boy who claimed he "went to heaven and came back" after being "internally decapitated" in a car accident recanted his story when he got older, stating he said it for attention, and the book about it was full of lies
ABQw TIL Scientists once had a favorite curb in Hayward, CA. They studied the curb because it lay on the Hayward fault line & was being pulled apart each year. This evidence of Earth’s shifting plates was observed from the 1970s till 2016 when the city decided to fix the sidewalk & unknowingly ruined it
e0DkL TIL that the legless Artic Explorer Peter Freuchen, who was a member of the Danish resistance during WW2, openly claimed to be Jewish whenever he witnessed anti-semitism, he was imprisoned by the Germans for this reason and was sentenced to death but he managed to escape and flee to Sweden.
XEddD TIL: the federation process that saw the creation of the nation of Australia originally involved Fiji and New Zealand. they chose not to join.
9Y0Dm TIL Ho Chi Minh, leader of the communist party in Vietnam, was witnessed by American advisors on September 2, 1945, giving a speech repeating the 2nd paragraph of Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Independence. That's why the current official motto of Vietnam is "Independence, Freedom, and Happiness."