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TIL In the Middle Ages in Europe they would burn cats for entertainment, sometimes symbolically as they associated them with witchcraft

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WrWL TIL that Hungary had a public online vote in 2006 to name a new bridge. Stephen Colbert mobilized his viewers and got 17 million votes to name the bridge “Stephen Colbert Bridge”. Hungary has a population of 10 million. Additional TIL: “Perl-Script Bridge” came in fifth.
9wMPr TIL that a consumer reports analysis in 2014 confirmed that 656 rice products had worrisome levels of arsenic exposure from brown and white rice, and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set a limit for total arsenic consumption in drinking water, but no such limits for food/other beverages
e0jb5 TIL After the Battle of Aspern-Essling (1809), the surgeon of the Napoleonic Army Larrey, lacking salt, seasoned a horse meat bouillon for the wounded under his care with gunpowder. It was also used for sterilization in ships when there was no alcohol.
479o TIL that White Coke was a colorless, unlabeled variant of Coca-Cola developed to look like vodka for Soviet Marshall Zhukov, who was introduced to Coke by Dwight Eisenhower during WWII but did not want to be seen drinking a symbol of American imperialism during the Cold War
EgDnp TIL that 1604, King James I wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, in which he described smoking as a ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs