› added 6 years ago

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TIL Eartha Kitt - known as the original singer of "Santa Baby" and the voice of Izma in The Emperor's New Groove - was blacklisted by the CIA after telling Lady Bird Johnson, "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot."

bLxp TIL While governor of Chukotka from 2000-2008, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich spent over US$1.3 billion of his own money on the region.
yQMWa TIL that Antartica has a native insect species the Antarctic Midge, Belgica Antarctica. The species has been for around 30 million years and has adapted to surviving the cold, it is the technically the largest land animal on the contient and has the tiniest genome of any insect.
w64M TIL There has been a very real problem in Northern Canada for decades. Native hitchhikers, mostly women, tend to go missing without explanation along a 800km stretch of road known as the Highway of Tears. Many think it is caused predominantly by 1-2 unknown serial killers.
R7eR4 TIL that before women became the mainstay telephone operators were teenage boys. The change came about when the lads being pesky teenagers pulled too many pranks, got drunk on the job and swore down the phone
w5ZJ TIL Mark Twain told an interviewer that he was not actually Mark Twain, but Mark Twain’s twin brother, but since his parents couldn’t tell which one drowned in the bath tub when they were babies, the parents decided that the one who lived must have been Mark.