› added 5 years ago

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TIL that Bob Barker, who hosted "The Price is Right," trained as a Navy fighter pilot in WW2, but wasn't sent to the fleet in time to fight. He once said: "I was all ready to go, and when the enemy heard that I was headed for the Pacific, they surrendered. That was the end of World War II."

8ZmX TIL in 1988, a retired police officer found Cyril Smith, British MP with 144 accusations of child molestation and abuse, in a home with a sex offender and two drunk teenage boys. He was threatened to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Nothing happened.
R7Lg9 TIL about Movile Cave, a cave that was cut off from the outside world for ~5.5 million years. There are sulfuric vents in the cave and all organisms within rely on chemosynthetic bacteria that use sulfur as an energy source. >50 species live there, 35 of which are endemic(they only exist there).
w1VY TIL many color laser printers employ ‘hidden’ dot codes that encode the serial number of the specific printer on every printed page to make your documents forensically tracecable back to the printer. The EFF believes printer manufacturers agreed in secret with governments to provide this tracking.
M7kVm TIL that a Swedish woman found her missing wedding ring, lost in 1995, wrapped around a carrot which she picked from her garden in 2012.
MWlA TIL while filming Poltergeist, Robbie truly got choked during a take by the robot clown doll — it wasn’t until the boy turned purple that Spielberg realized what was actually happening