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TIL direct taxation in Canada (government asking for a cut of your money each year) was only put in place temporarily during World War 1 to fund the war. More than a 100 years later, we are still paying for a temporary tax.

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00n1 TIL Elvis Presley did not write the song Hound Dog. The original song was performed by an artist called Big Mama Thornton
yVoKp TIL there's a species of fish (the Devils Hole pupfish) whose entire native range is a portion of a single underground pool in Death Valley.
OowRR TIL that The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for the largest possible prime number
MemOb TIL that shishi-odoshi, those cool Japanese bamboo water features that go DOOK, were created to scare away deer or boar so they don't eat the agriculture but are now an audiovisual aesthetic
781Xp TIL that recruitment to the British Army's Gurkha unit is extremely competitive, accepting only 230 recruits out of 28,000 applicants. All recruitment happens in Nepalese villages, and candidates must participate in a two-mile race up a steep hill, carrying 35kg of rocks in a basket.