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TIL Q Lazzarus, singer of Goodbye Horses, was unknown when the song appeared in Silence of the Lambs. Labels had rejected her due to her dreads, so she drove a cab. Once, she picked up "Lambs" director Jonathan Demme, and played him her demo. He responded "Oh my God, what is this and who are you?"

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6EnrQ TIL: the word "tycoon" is from the Japanese "taikun", meaning "great prince", and made the jump to English in the 1850s largely because it was used to describe Abraham Lincoln
awadZ TIL Certain oak tree populations will synchronize to produce almost no acorns, only to rain them down excessively the following year, known as a "mast" year. The year preceding the mast year is thought to starve off the mammal populations feeding on the acorns.
N7vP TIL the first US Warship to be named after a Black man was so named in 1943 for a sailor that could only get a job in the Navy as a food server, but at the battle of Guadalcanal he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire to save a shipmate
Mejrm TIL The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population
VM7Xm TIL In his early phases of Alzheimer's in 1995, 84 year old Ronald Reagan still received visitors at his office and worked out daily with his personal trainer. Routine is important to Alzheimer’s patients, and on good days Reagan's routine was the the same as it had been since leaving office