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TIL the wooden playground I grew up playing on was designed by Bob Leathers who designed over 2000 playgrounds around the US. His unique style was inspired by interviewing kids in the neighborhood who would request to have castles, spaceships and tree houses.

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5d4R TIL Canadian botanist Charles Budd Robinson was killed due to his bad language skill. When he asked a village boy to chop down a coconut (kelapa), he mistakenly asked the boy to chop down a head (kepala). The villagers mistook him for a headhunter and killed him.
Myr7 TIL that archaeology shows humans living in the Americas long before the formation of the Bering Straight Land Bridge.
XED4R TIL Douglas Adams, creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, wanted Slartibartfast's name to sound very rude. He was originally called "Phartiphukborlz", and changed it gradually until the BBC accepted it for radio broadcast.
jNXYE TIL Tom Attridge, the pilot of the first jet aircraft to shoot itself down. He fired two bursts midway through a shallow dive. As the trajectory of the cannon rounds decayed, they ultimately crossed paths with the jet as it continued its descent. Though it was a crash-landing, he survived.
R7PjQ TIL that in 1996, an American citizen swam across a Chinese river into North Korea on a drunken dare. He got caught, was held and imprisoned under suspicion of being a spy, but was eventually released back to the U.S. He committed suicide a few weeks later.