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TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.

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OoYLL TIL when ‘The Shining’ premiered, the MPAA wouldn’t allow blood to appear in any trailer “approved for all audiences,” but Stanley Kubrick managed to get a trailer comprised solely of the elevator scene passed by convincing the board the tsunami of blood was rusty water.
KvP9 TIL: that Seattle Mariners is owned by Nintendo (yes that nintendo) and has an app on the 3DS where you can order food at the stadium
LQ5r TIL that Malcolm X was declared mentally unfit for military service after telling draft board officials that he wanted to “steal us some guns, and kill us [some] crackers”.
b60l9 TIL that, even 35 years after the disaster, Chernobyl will be habitable again in about 20,000 years. Visiting is now considered safe, but there are still risks associated with touring due to the structural instability of the ruins.
WG1X TIL Game designer Will Wright was inspired to create a “virtual doll house” after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991 and subsequently rebuilding his life. Replacing his home and his other possessions made him think about adapting that life experience into a game, called ‘The Sims’.