› added 8 months ago

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TIL Bill Nye quit his job at Boeing to be a stand up comic after winning a Steve Martin look alike contest in 1978.

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Mbmm TIL that in the town of Virgin, Utah a law was passed which required every homeowner to keep and maintain a firearm.
e1G6 TIL that on December 10, 1987, a squirrel chewed through power lines and shut down the Nasdaq for 82 minutes, preventing the trading of approximately 20 million shares.
pYy1N TIL Jalapeño peppers are generally less spicy today than they were 20 years ago due to crossbreeding with a specific breed of Jalapeño that Texas A&M scientists created which has a consistently lower spice while also being hardier and quicker to grow.
gMygy TIL of the city of Salonica in modern day Greece was for centuries one of the only Jewish majority cities but during Nazi occupation 90% of the Jewish residents were murdered and their cultural artifacts plundered, houses stolen, and the cemetery dug up and the headstones used as building material.
epRPk TIL the US Navy named a warship after Harold Holt, an Australian Prime Minister who disappeared while swimming. The ship was eventually used as a training target and sunk in 2002.