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TIL the reason that NORAD annually tracks Santa Claus’ journey from the North Pole is because Sears printed an ad to talk to Santa on his private line, with a wrong phone number that was actually CONAD’s top secret hotline that would only ring if there was a national crisis

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wLOD7 TIL that Matt Stone and Trey Parker intended to do a shot-for-shot puppet parody of The Day After Tomorrow, and release it a day later than The Day After Tomorrow.
wolAM TIL that Roger Boisjoly was an engineer working at NASA in 1986 that predicted that the O-rings on the Challenger would fail and tried to abort the mission but nobody listened to him
xVdbk TIL about “The Harris’s List”, a catalogue from the 1700’s of all the prostitutes in London during that period, where you could find any sex workers’ address, price, age, skills, and it would rate their performance and describe their appearance. It was published annually for decades
jN1Pa TIL As the 2011Joplin Tornado hit the local pizza hut, store manager, Christopher Lucas herded 4 employees and 15 customers into a walk-in freezer. Since the door could not shut, he wrapped a bungee cable holding the door shut around his arm until he was sucked into the tornado, killing him.
Me7wb TIL of 'The Great Impostor', who successfully impersonated a career as a ship's doctor, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, amonk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher