› added 11 years ago

95

TIL an officer in the American Civil War, Benjamin Runkle, was mistakenly left for dead on the battlefield. An obituary was written for him while he was still alive, but ironically Runkle outlived the man who wrote it, and in return wrote an obituary for his obituary writer

6EZ0l TIL in 1940, a 14 year old Fidel Castro wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking "If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green American, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green American and I would like to have one of them."
JJO8 TIL a man with brain damage stuck in a coma-like state for 6 years was brought back to consciousness by doctors who implanted electrodes in his brain.
16ePr TIL that the Portugese Man o' War (Physalia physalis) is not a single organism (like a jellyfish) but a colony of clones. The creature is made up of multiple genetically identical organism, each of which alters itself to take on a different form/function to create the individual parts of the colony
49ob TIL that after losing his wife and two children due to a mid-air collision, Vitaly Kaloyev murdered the Air Traffic Controller responsible in front of the Air Traffic Controller’s kids and wife, spent 3 years in prison and returned back to Russia as a hero
gMbAW TIL that William Shakespeare wrote a play based on an incident in Miguel de Cervantes's 'Don Quixote'. The text is now lost, but there are two plays by later authors suspected of being reworked versions of Shakespeare's original text with the names of the characters changed