› added 5 years ago

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Today I Learned about Wilson “One-Man Regiment” Watson, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Battle of Iwo Jima. He is credited for being the inspiration of John Wayne’s “Shooting from the hip” style, along with single-handedly killing 90 Japanese Soldiers during the battle.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

w4eP TIL “Getting Someones Goat” comes from goats’ ability to calm race horses…opponents stealing the goat from the horses’ stall the night before a race would upset the horse and hurt their chances
N79K8 TIL Prince William will be the first English king (>50% English ancestry) of the UK/England since 1066. Normandies to Plantagenets were French, Tudors were Welsh, Stuarts were Scots, Hanovers to Windsors were Germans, QE2 is half-Scottish, and Charles is half-Greek.
b9Lj7 TIL Cat mummies were so plentiful in Egypt that, in the 1800s, an English company bought a load of 180,000, pulverized them and spread them on farm fields as fertilizer. Also so many baboons and ibises were mummified for the trade it likely drove them to extinction in Egypt.
b6kDa TIL that during WWII, the U.S. Army designed a grenade to be the same size and weight as a baseball, making it easier for American soldiers to throw.
9Y9X6 TIL the Canadian Medical Association voted in support of a ban of Mixed Martial Arts in Canada. They argued from a physician responsibility standpoint they could not overlook activities which cause injury and trauma to Canadians. They had previously come out against Boxing for similar reasons.