› added 6 years ago

279

TIL that by 3400 B.C. the Sumerians were growing the opium poppy and called it Hul Gil, the 'joy plant'.

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w0o8 TIL in 1993, during a Friar’s Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg, her then-boyfriend Ted Danson appeared in ‘black-face’ and began telling racially charged jokes. Whoopi came to his defense because she infact wrote much of the material and even referred him to the makeup artist.
M7rwb TIL after communists overthrew Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, they established the Derg regime that massacred thousands of people in Ethiopia
4km9J TIL that the conspiracy theorist David Icke was (before his mental breakdown and declaring himself the son of God in a chatshow in 1991) a footballer and a popular BBC sports correspondent
yVrAv TIL citizens in Estonia are given an ID card that includes a public/private key pair allowing users to cryptographically sign digital documents.
16Dmr TIL: There was a Roman pharmacologist named Sextius Niger who wrote that you can increase sexual desire by eating salamanders that were preserved in honey. He was also head of a school of philosophy known as the School of the Sextii which recommended vegetarianism.