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TIL that the author of Forrest Gump had a deal to receive a lump sum and a cut of the film's net profits, but Paramount reported a loss and refused to pay him the cut. He settled with Paramount and they bought the rights to the sequel, which has been stuck in development for over a decade.

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Y7aQx TIL - That during Apartheid in South Africa you were forbidden to have relations with someone of another race. The Boers developed the "Pencil Test"; if a pencil would stay in your hair when pushed in you were declared as "black" and could only have relations with other "blacks".
yVO6e TIL cats were a common wedding gift among Vikings due to their association with the goddess of luck, Freyja. Men favored women who loved cats, believing that it increased the likelihood of a happy marriage.
Vj0G TIL that Russian scientists were able to revive an arctic flower, extinct for 32,000 years, from a seed that’s been borrowed by an ice age squirrel, buried in Siberian permafrost.
9wZWr TIL in 1996, some characters were changed on the children's literacy program "The Letter People". Instead of vowels being all female characters and consonants being all male characters, a change was made to make half the letters male and half of them female. Junk food references were also replaced.
aw1yJ TIL China's "Lost Army." Following the Chinese Civil War, a KMT army fled into Burma and continued to fight the CCP from there. To fund their war, they seized a Burmese province and turned it into narco-state. Some of these soldiers eventually formed some of Southeast Asia's first drug syndicates.