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TIL about the Kanamara Matsuri, or "Festival of the Steel Phallus," a Japanese spring festival featuring phallus-shaped decorations, candies, carved vegetables, and other foods, held at a shrine where worshippers pray for safe childbirth, marital harmony, and protection from sexually transmitted inf

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4K7w TIL that Anthony Lane, a film critic for the New Yorker, once began reviewing ‘Contact’ (1997) and noted it “v. gloomy,” “odd noir look for sci-fi,” “creepy shadows in outdoor scene,” before realizing he had forgotten to take off his sunglasses.
b7KZ TIL Evan Mecham, Arizona Governor in 1987, rescinded MLK, Jr. Day as his first act in office and told a group of black community leaders, “You folks don’t need another holiday. What you folks need are jobs.”
1aJDO TIL before the invention of elevators, and for many years after, a building’s lowest floors were for the wealthy and the higher floors were for servants, storage or the poor.
XnXE TIL there is a species of sting-less bee in the Amazon Rainforest known as the “Barber Bee” that will cut your hair as a means of defense.
l7vyB TIL of the University of Bologna, the oldest in the Western World. A public university established in 1088, it's never been out of operation and counts over 80k students.