› added 11 years ago

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TIL Nicolas Cage was also offered the role of Neo in The Matrix, but turned it down saying that he was not mature enough as an actor.

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R7Wm9 TIL the word quarantine comes from a seventeenth-century Venetian variant of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.
yQB88 TIL the use of Hun as a pejorative term for Germans comes from a speech made by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1900 to troops going to fight the Boxer Rebellion in which he referenced Attila and his Huns making themselves feared in China
gMWeA TIL that a 2016 study found that the Thunder Mountain roller coaster at Disney World reliably makes people pass kidney stones.
VA6B TIL an actor who appeared as an extra in 12 episodes of the original Star Trek series – and whose face can be seen clearly in at least one episode – was never credited and his identity remains uncertain to this day
BrWQL TIL a woman in 2002 almost lost custody of her children seeking financial assistance after genetic testing showed she wasn’t the mother. She in fact exhibited chimerism, or 2 sets of DNA.