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TIL C.S. Lewis had two requirements for a film adaptation of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”: It should not be live-action, and Disney should not be involved.

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9YW7p TIL a Dutch student was suspended from school in 2008 after uploading a video showing him slapping his penis against the Taj Mahal. The act of slapping one's penis against an object is called "swaffelen" and was voted word of the year in 2008 in the Netherlands.
NjeN TIL squirrels do not use sense of smell to find the hundreds of locations where they stored nuts for winters, instead they rely on spatial memory to remember location of each nut. A feat possible because of significantly larger hippocampus in rodent species.
7d4L TIL Hegesias, an Ancient Greek philosopher, was banned from teaching in Alexandria after writing a book called Death By Starvation, which argued that death is superior to living. It inspired many suicides, leading to his nickname: “The Death-Persuader”
loyPG TIL Henry Heimlich, the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, has a son, Peter, who is devoted to exposing him as a serial liar and con artist. Peter says his father paid off the study that persuaded the American Red Cross to change its response to choking to Heimlich's.
kO89B TIL On April 30, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov removed his own infected appendix at the Soviet Novolazarevskaja Research Station in Antarctica, as he was the only doctor there. The operation lasted one hour and 45 minutes and it was a success.