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196

TIL that Mad Magazine publisher William Gaines once took his entire staff to Haiti to convince the sole Haitian subscriber to renew. When a neighbor also bought a subscription Gaines then declared the trip to be a financial success because the magazine had doubled its Haitian circulation.

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l7Er TIL that an East Germany film studio made several successful “Westerns”. The heroes were not cowboys but Native Americans.
BrX9e TIL honeybees that get drunk on fermented tree sap are denied access to the hive and are often attacked by the sober bees.
X0ZjD TIL that Joro spiders, extremely large orb weavers native to Japan but introduced to America, are eating invasive crop-destroying pests such as stink bugs instead of being invasive themselves.
78WNL TIL: Until 2013, foreign chefs in Japan were legally barred from working in restaurants specializing in traditional Japanese food and could only serve foreign cuisine. Japan changed its regulations for foreign chefs after traditional Japanese cuisine won UNESCO designation.
8MlK TIL that the Mongols’ military tactics were so fierce that they would catapult diseased corpses over city walls to infect the population and even rerouted rivers after a city had fallen so that it could never rise again