› added 5 years ago

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TIL Viggo Mortensen is fluent in 4 languages, conversational in another, and can understand 2 more. He's also an accomplished poet, painter, photographer, and musician with an extensive bibliography and discography, in addition to his acting career.

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6lnQ TIL Claudette Colvin actually refused to give up her seat on a bus months before Rosa Parks, but she was 15 and pregnant so the NAACP didn’t want to publicize her.
yQDwM TIL of the Saro Lerwick, a WWII RAF flying boat with a very poor loss rate. Of the 21 built, 10 were lost to accidents, and an 11th, on patrol in good weather, just disappeared
neJ59 TIL about Buckfast--a wine brewed by some of the last Benedictine monks in Britain, sold as a tonic in UK pharmacies, and known infamously in Scotland as "Wreck the Hoose Juice" where it was associated with >40% of all violent crime there in 2015
epx0k TIL a common trope of early vernacular Chinese novels was "(A) lone Tibetan monk with his potent aphrodisiacs and retractable penis"
yQdwe TIL 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic