› added 4 years ago

138

TIL Los Angeles has an abandoned subway system

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XeOR TIL the current King of Sweden is Karl XVI despite only being the 10th king of that name; in 1604, Karl IX (actually the third) picked his regnal number based on a completely fictitious history of Sweden, and the mistake stuck.
wDWW TIL that grunting in tennis is punishable by losing a point to the opponent. This is because some player’s grunts, like Maria Sharapova’s, whose grunt is nearly equal to that of a lion’s roar, can affect how the opponent returns the ball.
j4pR TIL pet stores in New York had to ban drunk people from buying puppies, to protect the dogs from irresponsible owners who returned them the next day.
AA64 TIL Up until the 1960’s, poor Swiss children could be auctioned to farmers using them as a source of cheap labour
P15yJ TIL Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Mac in 1985, more than 2 years before releasing it on Windows