› added 3 years ago

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TIL infamous cult leader Jim Jones poisoned his followers with Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid); earlier, he'd been awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for his progressive integrationist views.

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yQpAV TIL about Fred Scolari, an NBA player who was blind in 1 eye, deaf in 1 ear, short, and overweight, but he was a 2-time All-Star
WemX TIL from 1970 to 2010, populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have declined by an average of 52%. We are not in the “beginning” of the Sixth Great Extinction. We are in the middle of it.
PYMLe TIL that were was an ice cream brand called Star Spangled Ice Cream, which aimed to be a politically conservative counterpart to Ben & Jerry's (which they considered too liberal). Flavor names included "Smaller Governmint", "Iraqi Road" and "I Hate the French Vanilla".
ADwvo TIL Joseph Kennedy threatened to sue ABC for revealing that his son John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer-prize winning book Profiles in Courage was ghost-written. They retracted the story. The book wasn't considered for the prize until Joe convinced a boardmember to persuade others to vote for it.
9odm TIL physicist Bernard Waldman witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima, as a camera operator on the observation aircraft. He was equipped with a special high-speed movie camera with six seconds of film to record the blast. Unfortunately, Waldman forgot to open the camera shutter, and no film was exposed.