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TIL One of the oldest children’s lullabies was found on an ancient Babylonian tablet, believed to be from around 2,000BC. Rather than being soothing, it instead has a menacing tone. In it, a baby being is threatened with punishment for disturbing the family god with its crying.

6ER77 TIL: That the idiom “to steal someone’s thunder” originated from the dramatist John Dennis who found out that his idea for a thunder machine for his play was stolen and used in a different play in the same theater
6998l TIL: Back in 1910, Citibank took over the national bank of Haiti, which besides being the sole commercial bank also served as the Haitian treasury and then in 1915 after both withholding Haitian funds and paying rebels to destabilize the country, the bank pressured the US Government to occupy Haiti
YpAjd TIL in 1965, a Swedish student was told by his fiancée in East Germany that she would never be able to leave the country to live with him in Sweden. Undeterred, he took flying lessons for a year, illegally flew a Cessna from Austria into Czechoslovakia, smuggled her out, and married her in Sweden
X0EY8 TIL that in the original novel of "The Silence of the Lambs", Hannibal Lecter doesn't drink Chianti with the Census taker's liver, but instead Amarone. Amarone is frequently paired with offal, such as Liver, and also with Hunted game.
P1xjO TIL about Shingle Weavers, men who operated saws to cut Red Cedar into roof shingles. Fires, missing fingers/hands, and sawdust lining their lungs were common hazards of the job.