› added 11 years ago

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TIL In the 1912 Olympics, Duke Kahanamoku was favored to win 100m freestyle swim. When he overslept, missing the prelims. Cecil Healy of Australia refused to swim in final unless Duke was allowed to swim special qualifier. The judges relented; Healy’s sportsmanship cost him the gold.

6EGKm TIL due to lash back from a Far Side cartoon where a female chimp finds a human hair on the male she is grooming and says, “Conducting a little ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?”, Gary Larson now donates all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon to The Jane Goodall Institute.
8Qxa TIL: All octopuses are venomous! They ‘drill’ a hole through the prey’s shell or exoskeleton using their tough beak and tongue and insert their venomous saliva into the soft interior to kill their prey. There is a special antarctic octopus whose venom works at temperatures that other venom wouldn’t!
lo9vB TIL that children (and adults) in the US were tattooed with their ABO Blood group and Rhesus factor(Rh) by schools in the 1950s. With Cold War at its peak, children were included in this program to cover potential shortages in blood banks in case of a Soviet Union attack.
nemE9 TIL In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon its logo of the golden arches of the letter M, but psychologist Louis Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding because of their "Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts."
8aywV Today I learned it wasn't until the Voting Rights Act was passed on August 6, 1965 that black women were officially allowed to exercise their right to vote.