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TIL of ‘Sin Eaters’ whose job it was to “eat” the sins of a deceased person. The position only paid a couple dollars per sin eating and it usually called for the individual to eat a piece of bread that had been sitting on the dead person’s chest or lips.

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Oa0L TIL that in the wake of the Civil War, some Confederate sympathizers fled the United States and founded colonies in Mexico and South America. Several thousand Southerners chose to settle in Brazil, where they established small villages with names like “Americana” and “New Texas.”
rN9Re TIL that sticking out one’s tongue is a sign of respect or agreement and was often used as a greeting in traditional Tibetan culture. Apparently, a cruel ninth-century Tibetan king had a black tongue, so people stick out their tongues to show that they are not like him (and aren’t his reincarnation)
vPKjL TIL Georgia O'Keeffe's husband advertised her flower paintings as looking like genitalia, but she denied it and considered the sexual interpretation degrading.
eMWL TIL George Lucas originally planned to make a sci-fi film called “Space Pirates 9000” but William Friedkin urged him to change the name to “Star Wars”
wN0P TIL of Karl Patterson Schmidt, an herpetologist (amphibian expert) who was fatally bitten by a boomslang snake and, knowing he would die, created a scientific account of his own dying process by keeping track of his symptoms right until the very end of his life.