› added 9 years ago

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TIL in 1953, following athlete Jim Thorpe’s death, his widow was upset that his native Oklahoma would not memorialize him. Hearing of two random towns in Pennsylvania that were desperate for money, she convinced them to merge and name the new town Jim Thorpe, PA, which it’s still called to this day.

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eK76 TIL that a paper published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology concluded “This paper provides support for the "Rotten Barrel” theory of police deviant behavior, which holds that the stressful conditions of the police occupation constitute a primary risk factor for police misconduct.“
6EZDW TIL - In response to claims that Star Trek uniforms were sexist by having women wearing short skirts, men started to wear them too, creating what was known as the "skant"(skirt and pant) uniform for men.
RAA8 TIL in the late 80s, Paramount Pictures planned to make a Doctor Who movie. Their top choices to play the Time Lord? Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.
P1K1O TIL The Secret Service that protects the U.S. President used to be part of the Department of the the Treasury. Their original mission was to stop the spread of counterfeit money, a function which they still serve today.
VMDe8 TIL the passenger pigeon once had a population of 3-5 billion birds in North America. Hunters killed tens of thousands of them every day, then ignored calls to protect them when their numbers dwindled, until the last wild one was shot and stuffed in 1902, and the last captive one died in 1912.