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TIL on it's last flight one SR-71 Blackbird broke four world speed records. The trip from L.A. to D.C. was completed in a cool 64 minutes 20 seconds. The plane landed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and has never flown again.

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WkNEd TIL of Bob Fletcher: he took care of the farms of three Japanese-American families as they were interned in World War 2. By maintaining their farms and paying their taxes and mortgages, he ensured the families didn't lose everything. He was finally shot at for supporting these families.
DAAr TIL that 17th and 18th century English-speaking pirates probably talked just like any other sailors of the day. Most phrases considered ‘pirate talk’ come from a 1950s Disney movie, Treasure Island.
8eMWa TIL The US attempted to engineer longer monsoon seasons in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War in order to 'ruin roads, jam rivers, and extend the amount of time swathes of Vietnam weren’t traversable.' After 5 years and millions of dollars spent, it's not clear if it accomplished anything.
YR0W TIL if each star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second since the Big Bang, they’d only be starting to repeat shuffles now.
4wRo TIL Hannibal Lecter was making a medical joke with his famous “ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti” line: three foods that interact negatively with older kinds of antidepressant meds are liver, beans and wine.