› added 7 years ago

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TIL Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was financed by Quaker Oats to promote their new Wonka Bar.

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pYEOp TIL of Trofim Lysenko, an influential Soviet scientist who rejected genetics in favor of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas. These ideas led to catastrophic famines in the Soviet Union that killed millions of people, and was also adapted in China to similarly calamitous results.
G0yQ TIL that a man once made a deal to pay a then 90-year old woman 2500 franc a month in order to inherit her aparment when she died. She eventually outlived the man with him dying 30 years later. The woman became the oldest person on earth, living to be 122.
9wpbm TIL A professional baseball player named Chicken Wolf hit a walk-off (game-winning) inside-the-park home run due to an outfielder being bit by a dog.
kO144 TIL Prosperity Gospel is a religious belief among some Christians, who hold that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one’s material wealth.
5VO99 TIL in 1879, a French peasant woman and her husband claimed (falsely) to have inherited a large sum of money from a stranger who’s life they saved on a train. They lived in luxury for 20 years until the safe was opened and contained a brick and an English halfpenny.