› added 6 years ago

167

TIL J.K. Rowling wrote to Natalie McDonald, a leukemia patient, the ending of The Goblet of Fire a year early. She died before reading the email so Rowling named a character after her. That character was sorted into Gryffindor.

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wLBA1 TIL Humans are incredible long distance runners. There’s a Man vs Horse marathon held in Wales annually since 1980. It’s been won by a human multiple times after the first human winner in 2004.
aAnJ TIL that China is not the only state to have limited the number of children allowed per family. A two-child policy existed in Vietnam, is being considered in the Philippines and has been advocated in the UK.
nWrld TIL an apocryphal story states that the Roman Emperor Honorius was shocked upon the news of the 410 AD Sack of Rome. However, the emperor thought the news regarded one of his favorite pet chickens named Roma, and upon learning it was the city of Rome, the emperor breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Zwdp TIL that gifs would load ~8 times faster if we converted them all to HTML5 video
N7JEe TIL: To identify the pilots guilty of "buzzing" (doing dangerously low-altitude fly-bys) of bases or populated areas, for decades many US military planes were marked with short unique I.D. codes painted-on with large letters. Such marks (different from serial numbers) came to be called BUZZ NUMBERs.