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TIL The man with the world’s longest-ever beard, four and a half feet long, broke his neck and died after tripping over it.

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m1wgo TIL America, named after explorer Amerigo Vespucci, owes its name to cartographer Vautrin Lud and other members of the Vosges Gymnasium, who in 1507 produced the Universalis Cosmographia in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges (France), the world's first map to include the “new continent”.
PR4G TIL that T.G.I. Friday’s began in Manhattan in 1965 as one of the world’s first singles bars. It was very successful, in part because 480 stewardesses lived next door to the first location. The restaurant became family-oriented only after expanding to the suburbs.
GADpJ TIL that younger sailors weren't subjected to the infamous "Cat o' nine tails" for punishment. Instead, they faced discipline with a milder whip called the "Boy's Pussy.
gr5jA TIL there was a famous Japanese game show in which diehard baseball fan contestants were locked individually in small rooms for an entire baseball season: if their favorite team won each night they got dinner for the evening, if their team lost the lights would be turned out until the next win.
Dvov TIL Richard the Lionheart had 3,000 captured Muslim prisoners (including large numbers of women and children) taken to a hill. There, in full view of Saladin and his army, they were beheaded and disemboweled. Even in an age of atrocities, this was an act of exceptional and shocking barbarity.