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TIL Toishanese was the dominant language as well as lingua franca in Chinatowns across Canada and the United States. It is commonly mistaken for Cantonese but has little mutual intelligibility with it

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4XlYR TIL On June 7th, 1692 the pirate city, Port Royal, in Jamaica was rocked by a massive earthquake that shook the city into the ocean, leaving 2,000 souls burried under sand and brick. Shortly after the quake, a tsunami flooded what was left.
9YlKQ TIL that the traditional "Last Meal" for those sentenced to death begun as a way to bribe their ghost not to haunt the executioners.
QJDad TIL when Weird Al Yankovic asked Kurt Cobain to parody 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that Kurt asked him if it would be about food, and Al said it would be about how no one could understand his lyrics. Kurt found that extremely funny, and said absolutely.
v1vlx TIL that L. Frank Baum, author of "The Wizard of Oz", wanted to exterminate all remaining American Indians in the 1890s
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