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TIL of “imprints”, hand-reared falconry birds sexually attracted to their keepers. To breed an imprint, the keeper “lets the male bird copulate with his head” while wearing a special hat for semen collection

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b6nA4 TIL that in Wuppertal, Germany in 1950, the circus elephant Tuffi broke through a window of a moving overhead railway and fell 12 metres down in a river, while on promotion tour for a circus. Luckily she survived with minor injuries.
40VJ TIL that in 2002, a fire at a girls’ school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia killed fifteen girls. It has been strongly suggested that their deaths occured due to the involvement of the “religious police,” who prevented them from leaving the building because the girls were not wearing correct Islamic dress.
wxl8 TIL that in 1978 France rolled out a pre-World Wide Web online service (MiniTel) that gave it’s users access to online shopping, search engines, cybersex, message boards etc … France Telecom only retired the service in 2012 after 30 years and 800 000 units still in use.
e0dXb TIL Thanks to a Swedish tax law regarding costumes, ABBA’s stage clothes were outlandishly-designed on purpose. As long as they were impractical for everyday wear, the group’s outfits were tax-deductible.
WkgBN TIL Floyd Paxton was eating complimentary nuts and realized he didn’t have a way to close them if he wanted to save some for later. As a solution, he took out a pen knife and hand-carved the first bread clip out of a credit card. His company, Kwik Lok, produces billions of bread closures a year.