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TIL A Woman in Oregon started a wildfire to give some work to her bored firefighter friends. Eventually, the fire, named as the Sunnyside Turnoff wildfire, spread to about 80 square miles — 51,000 acres — costing nearly $8 million to fight and took two months to bring under complete control.

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rXBW TIL Microsoft once deliberately made MSN.com look faulty in Opera browsers, pushing Opera users to IE. As a reply, Opera Software released Opera Bork Edition, which made MSN.com look like its text was written in gibberish by Swedish Chef from Muppets Show.
yQGKe TIL that President John F. Kennedy's younger sister, Rosemary Kennedy, was diagnosed as mentally deficient and forced to undergo a lobotomy. She was strapped to a table against her will and lobotomized, permanently incapacitating and institutionalizing her until her death in 2005.
N7VlQ TIL Fresh snow absorbs sound, lowering ambient noise over a landscape because the trapped air between snowflakes attenuates vibration. That´s why it gets so quite when it snows.
LkKjr TIL of the Citadel of Erbil, a mound continuously inhabited since 5000 BC. In 2007 all inhabiants were temporarily evicted to conduct a restoration project, except for a single family, who was allowed to stay as to not break the continuous habitation record.
xEM7 TIL in Korea, in lieu of monthly rent, a “Jeonse” agreement is where the renter pays a percentage of the market value of a property up front, the landlord invests it, and at the end of the lease, the renter is returned 100% of their investment. The landlord earns interest on investments this way.