› added 11 years ago

75

TIL that in 1983 Mr. T was the White House’s Santa Clause.

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D7Ng TIL that Aztecs took two showers a day and used flowers as soap and cleaned their mouth with them as well. The Spaniards at the time avoided water because it was thought water on your skin made you more susceptible to the plague and they used urine to clean their mouths and teeth.
j6nrQ TIL there are over 200 "wind phones" in the US where grieving people can 'talk' to relatives - they feature an old-fashioned phone booth with a phone with a dial on it, and were first popularized in Japan after the Fukushima tsunami
b6XA7 TIL The US TV show Dallas is alleged to have helped partially hasten the downfall of communist Romania. The regime allowed airings of the show in the 1980s believing that the show would be seen as anti-capitalistic. This backfired as citizens desired the luxurious lifestyle portrayed in the show.
JYPOl TIL scientists put slime mold over a map of Tokyo, with food used to represent urban areas, after a day the mold created a network nearly identical to Tokyo's rail network. Which was designed to be as efficient as possible, the slime mold did the same, but without a brain.
KOrgB TIL: Michael Scott from The Office has Histrionic Personality Disorder