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TIL that Craig Ferguson, the host of The Late Late Show would rip up his blue note cards (which contained potential questions for guests) as a way of signifying that what was coming wasn't really planned. Sometimes, that brought a lot of empty riffing with a celebrity who just couldn't keep up.

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X06YP TIL of the Darvaza gas crater, AKA the Gates of Hell, a crater in Turkmenistan that has been on fire since the ‘80s. Engineers wanted to prevent the emission of poisonous gases by igniting them, but reportedly underestimated how much there was.
dnkZ TIL Canada turned its only privately-run prison to publicly-run in 2006 after a study between it and an identical publicly-run prison found the publicly-run one had better outcomes in “basically every single area.”
m1jLx TIL that in 1926, the Poltiburo of the Soviet Union was made up of seven men, Joseph Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Alexei Rykov. By 1940, Stalin was the only one of them left alive, having killed all of the other members.
EgrBo TIL before he could start editing and technically enhancing the "Get Back" documentary Peter Jackson first had to listen to 130 hours of audio and watch 57 hours of film footage of the Beatles writing and rehearsing
GOp5 TIL Sweden’s tourist association has create a “Call a Swede” phone number which is assigned to random de facto ‘ambassadors’ with no training or expectations. The goal is to provide an unfiltered view of Swedish life.