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TIL basketball Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon wore off-brand shoes. To combat the robberies and killings for shoes that was common at the time, he even released his own signature shoe with Spalding, for $34.95.

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a89Ro TIL on April Fool’s Day of 1957 the BBC showed a 3 minute report broadcast showcasing a Swiss family harvesting spaghetti from their family spaghetti tree convincing numerous British people that spaghetti grew on trees.
xBK7 TIL a $1.99 bottle of wine, “Two Buck Chuck”, beat 2300 other wines to win the 28th Annual International Eastern Wine Competition.
5VYBD TIL that, because of a certain time zone is more than 12 hours offset from UTC (Line Islands, Kiribati, UTC+14), it can simultaneously be three different days on Earth at the same time!
wNvJ TIL A former dictator of of Myanmar thought 9 was his lucky number, so decreed that all currency denominations not divisible by 9 no longer had value, devastating the savings of much of the population.
9Z9Q TIL Keiko, the orca who starred in Free Willy was released in the wild in July of 2002 after being in captivity for 23 years. A few weeks after his release, he showed up at a Norwegian fjord in hopes of seeking human contact and would even give children rides on his back.