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TIL: In 1943, WWII destroyer O'Bannon found itself too close to a surfaced Japanese submarine to aim its guns. US Sailors saved the ship by throwing potatoes at the Japanese crew running to the sub’s deck gun.

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jN4rQ TIL during China's Cultural Revolution, in one province, there were multiple gruesome instances of cannibalism (not due to hunger) motivated purely by ideological zeal
a8OEL TIL that in 1997 Pope John Paul II had named St. Isidore of Seville as the patron saint of the Internet, as the seventh-century theologian and encyclopedist who wrote the sole encyclopedia for nearly a millenium around 650 AD.
DQLe TIL that Samuel L. Jackson ODed on heroin a few times so switched to coke.
NXQm1 TIL that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Splinter also shares his name with a famous Renaissance artist - 'Lo Scheggia' or 'The Splinter'
GA1Wj TIL that there is a continuous line of doctoral advisor-advisee relationships going back from the present to the 1200s to a scholar named Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Yūnus. He has more than 190,000 known academic "descendants", including Leonardo da Vinci and mathematicians Fourier, Lagrange, and Hilbert.