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TIL During the Napoleonic wars, a monkey was hanged in England because all the Englishmen knew of the Frenchmen was that they were “short, hairy and spoke another language” and took the monkey to be a French sailor.

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mxgLv TIL Researchers have uncovered the earliest evidence of a person being hit and killed by a meteorite falling to Earth, which killed one person and injured another, occurred in what is now Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, on Aug. 22, 1888.
oRlvK TIL Thomas F Wilson, who played Biff in Back to The Future, shared an apartment with Andrew Dice Clay and Yakov Smirnoff before his big break.
m1OM TIL that a study was done on the average happiness level of country and Nigeria was first, Mexico was second
dD9aj TIL that Hiawatha was a real person, but Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha wasn’t really about him at all
0weVR TIL spiral staircases in medieval castles were deliberately made clockwise because it diminished the ability of attackers to properly swing their swords, since right-handed fighters would have had to to contend with the walls while making their striking motions.