› added 12 years ago

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TIL when Canada switched to the Metric System in 1970, a group of angry Conservative members of Parliament opened up an illegal “Freedom to Measure” gas station, which sold gas in gallons.

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pG5p TIL scientific evidence confirms Australian Aboriginal’s oral history myths about the formation of their land’s geography from up to 12,000 years ago.
PYQ4J TIL the classic Peanuts football gag ended on October 24, 1999. In the final strip, Rerun held the football instead of Lucy and whether or not Charlie Brown kicked the football was never revealed.
0pk5 TIL that the Smithsonian was created from a donation of a wealthy Englishman that had never once set foot on American soil - and he also never wrote about or discussed the motives for this bequest.
QJgQ9 TIL that "twitchers" are committed bird-watchers who travel long distances to see new species. They have their own jargon, including "nemesis" for a bird that has eluded them despite multiple attempts to see it, and "plastic" for a bird that escaped from captivity rather than being genuinely wild.
ek65 TIL that during the 1979 Grand Mosque Seizure of Mecca by Islamic Insurgent, a french special commando briefly converted to Islam in order to respect the rules forbidding non-muslims to enter the “holy city” and then intervene.