› added 4 years ago

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TIL Amerigo Vespucci (and by extension, America) may have been named after St. Emericus of Hungary. St. Emericus died at 24 during a boar hunt, and was only canonized 52 years later after a series of miracles occured at his grave. His bones were dug up for the ceremony.

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4kMjN TIL about the Zanclean flood: 5.33 Mya the dried-up Mediterranean Sea completely refilled within months, after being cut-off from the Atlantic for 630,000 years (Messinian salinity crisis). The waters broke through the Strait of Gibraltar at 1,000x the rate of the Amazon!
x0d1 TIL that Nimrod, recorded in Genesis as “a mighty hunter before the Lord” is now used to mean a dimwitted or stupid person because of Bugs Bunny who sarcastically refers to Elmer Fudd as “nimrod,” an ironic connection between “mighty hunter” and “poor little Nimrod”, i.e. Fudd. No one got the joke.
X07NP TIL that Nelvana did dubbed all 70 episodes of Cardcaptors in Canada and Australia and that Kids WB was the one that cut it down to 39 episodes in the US.
M7Ao8 TIL about Lake Mega Chad which was an ancient lake bigger than the Caspian Sea
ADmgn TIL that during a Cincinnati Reds game in 1935 a local stripper jumped onto the field, grabbed a baseball bat, and dared the pitcher to throw her something. He did, and she grounded to first base. She remains the only woman to play in a Major League Baseball game.