› added 8 years ago

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TIL The woman that started Mothers Day in the USA wished she had never started the Day because the commercialism behind it got so out of control

4XakR TIL that when advice columnist Ann Landers asked in 1986 what the correct direction for toilet paper was, she received 15,000 letters - the most in her column's history
JYGGm TIL: Of Michael Fagan an unemployed man down on his luck who broke into Buckingham palace twice, stole a bottle of wine on first entry, returned a week later and spoke directly to the queen in her own bed to complain of the current state and of the UK.
5VKaB TIL: The Allies raided a Nazi chemical company in 1944 and interrogated a chemist due to the amount of radioactive material involved. However, they learned that he was not working on nukes, but radioactive toothpaste known as Duramad, using radiation to kill germs. Some samples are in a museum now.
kJP8E TIL that it was practically illegal to own gold in the US from 1933 to 1974. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order to force all citizens to turn in almost all gold for about $20 per ounce, then declared the value of $20 in gold to be worth $35 in paper currency - creating a massive inflation.
e0gp6 TIL about Bertrand Russel's teapot. If he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.