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TIL in the 1930’s, Mussolini, outlawed pasta. Instead of producing strong Italian soldiers, the pasta weighed the youth down and made them lazy. The real reason was that Mussolini wanted to sell more rice, a staple crop in his home region in Northern Italy, which caused a split with the South.

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5Vygr TIL after feeling dissapointed by how DARLING in the FRANXX ended and wanting to explore some of the concepts, canadian writer Xiran Jay Zhao wrote Iron Widow, a reimagining of the story of Wu Zetian in a futuristic medieval China. The book won multiple awards and became a NY Times best seller.
VMO44 TIL In 1912, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo invented a chess-playing machine that could solve a king and rook vs king endgame. It didn't always deliver mate in the fewest number of moves, nor always within the 50-move rule limit but it would checkmate the opponent every time.
KO6MR TIL in 2008 a man at a ski resort in Italy stole a rubber padding used on a barrier to stop people at the bottom of a sledding hill. He used the padding to sled down the hill, hitting the barrier that he stole the padding from and died.
X09XD TIL that one of the reasons "Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard became so popular is because strippers in Florida found it easy to dance to and kept requesting it
kOyb7 TIL about Operation Platypus: in 1943, Winston Churchill randomly demanded a live platypus from Australia. The poor platypus (named Winston, of course) was sent across the ocean to Liverpool but died just 4 days before the arrival when the ship got attacked by a U-boat attack.