› added 5 years ago

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TIL the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations can legally appoint non-voting delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives. To date, only one has been nominated and is awaiting confirmation.

Wk1RL TIL that a "white elephant gift exchange" gets its name from the legend of the King of Siam gifting rare albino elephants to those who displeased him in hopes that the upkeep costs would financially ruin them.
p8Vbp TIL about Australian drug smuggler David McMillan who is the only Westerner to have successfully escaped Bangkok's notorious Klong Prem prison. He cut his cell bars with hacksaws, scaled seven inner walls, then mounting the outer wall using a bamboo ladder.
Eg4oX TIL That the long term leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, despite being a driving force behind the construction of the Berlin Wall and the order to shoot anyone attempting to flee to the West never served any prison time for his crimes.
8aLM4 TIL why "w" is pronounced double-u. The Roman alphabet did not have the letter"w" so when Latin was first used in Old English, they needed to invent a symbol for the sound made by "w" - so they made it "uu" (there was no "v" in Old English). 400 years later, Norman scribes conjoined it to become "w"
LkOZZ TIL A man ran for asking for equal wage for women and African-Americans in 1944. He was cheated by party politics despite being more popular than any other candidate at the time. He wanted to end the tensions with Russia. As a kid, he learned from under George Washington Carver on farming.