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TIL the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog puppet was found in an assortment of animal puppets at a country furniture store by Robert Smigel and his wife. Smigel immediately used it to jokingly smell his wife's butt, so she bought seven of those puppets and later gave them to Smigel as a birthday gift

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Wk7ed In Tanzania, a non-profit organization called APOPO trains African giant pouched rats to save lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis.
xd8o TIL that to circumvent US laws banning the export of cryptography software as “ammunition”, PGP inventor Phill Zimmermann published the entire sourcecode in a hardcover book. The export of books is fully legal.
Rd69 TIL the Soviet government advised those working on the Chernobyl disaster to drink half a glass of vodka for every two hours in Chernobyl. The radiation was supposed to accumulate in the thyroid glands and the vodka was thought to help clean out the radiation.
kbW TIL there is a staffed underwater post office where people have been mailing postcards for years.
JyOv TIL that Pyrrhus of Epirus lost so many men in his victories against Rome that he claimed, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.“ This coined the term pyrrhic victory.