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TIL Vincent Van Gogh originally planned to become a minister. As a missionary in a poor Belgian mining town, he gave away his nice lodgings to a homeless person and moved into a small hut where he slept on straw. This caused the church to dismiss him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood."

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d8PyZ TIL about the divorce trial of Leonard and Alice Rhinelander in 1924. The wealthy Leonard Rhinelander was ordered by his father to annul his marriage, so he claimed Alice lied about being white. Alice was ordered to show the jury her naked body. The jury decided she didn't lie about her mixed race.
PdvV TIL of Whang-Od. She is the last Mambabatok (traditional Kalinga tattooist) and the oldest tattoo artist in the Philippines
nv7W TIL that Ernest Hemingway’s mother disliked his first book, The Sun Also Rises, apparently claiming he was “prostituting a great talent” and “pandering to sensationalism”
Bg7OK TIL, In the movie 300, a Persian emissary is thrown down a well by Leonidas. In reality, Sparta sent two volunteers back to Persia to be executed, in atonement for the deaths of the Persians.
R7re9 TIL that In February 1939, Lise Meitner described a groundbreaking nuclear phenomenon in a letter to Nature editor and called it Nuclear Fission. Five years later, a Nobel prize was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of fission; a word he never used in his original paper.