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TIL The 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed more people than all the battles in WWI combined

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Oo7YR TIL Number 4 (四; accounting 肆; pinyin sì) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous to the word "death" (死 pinyin sǐ). Due to that, many numbered product lines skip the "4": e.g., Nokia cell phones (there is no series beginning with a 4), Palm PDAs, Canon PowerShot
v1PJx TIL Jelly Roll Morton, at the age of 14 tricked his great-grandmother into believing he was a night watchman at a barrel house when in fact he was working as a piano player in a brothel. In that atmosphere, he often sang smutty lyrics; he took the nickname "Jelly Roll", which was slang for vagina.
4XNaw TIL Starbucks would not exist without the intervention of Bill Gates’ dad, who yelled at and shamed a colleague for trying to outbid Howard Schultz’ on Starbucks and steal “a kid’s” dream away from him. The colleague withdrew and Gates Sr. helped Howard Schultz fund the deal.
awgrJ TIL To promote “The Room”, Tommy Wiseau personally spent $5,000 a month on a highway billboard advert for 5 years. This is in spite of the fact that the film only played for 2 weeks in the summer of 2003. Wiseau kept promoting it for years after it closed.
wo0xM TIL about a 1960s era Canadian device that supposedly tested whether or not you were a homosexual