› added 4 years ago

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TIL that the lowest house number in the UK is not 1. It is -2. There are also houses with non-integer numbers like 6.5, and a street called Street Road.

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0wGeR TIL in 1917, 1,300 miners went on strike in Bisbee, AZ over unsafe working conditions, low pay, and long hours. The mining company hired 2,000 men and loaded the strikers at gunpoint into cattle cars for a 16 hour trip through the desert without food or water and left them in New Mexico.
7JKP TIL that the idiom “the cat’s out of the bag” is derived from a practice by some merchants who sold piglets in bags. If the buyer was distracted, the merchant would quickly switch the piglet w/ a cat. The buyer wouldn’t realize until they got home and let the cat, and not a piglet, out of the bag.
laBK TIL the han dynasty of China drilled for natural gas, tranposted it through pipelines and used it in stoves
RQYw TIL in 1812 Charles Barnard, a captain of an American sealer ship, rescued marooned British sailors from the Falkland Islands despite the 2 countries being at war. While he searched for provisions, the British sailors stole his ship and he himself was marooned for 18 months.
1KgD TIL: Sally Field has played both Tom Hanks’ love interest in Punchline and his mom in Forrest Gump.