› added 5 years ago

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TIL a lawyer used his will for practical jokes. He gave a house to 3 men who hated each other, stocks in a brewery to preachers, shares of a racetrack to each ministers "except Spracklin, who shot a hotelkeeper", and gave the rest to whoever had the most kids in 10 years.

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QJGQe TIL of André Stander, a South African police officer who robbed almost 30 banks. Sometimes he’d carry out a crime during his lunch break and then return to the scene as an investigating officer. He was caught but escaped, formed a gang and robbed more banks. He was eventually killed in Florida.
VMKY4 TIL Beethoven was never considered a child prodigy. In fact, he didn't play his first symphony until he was 30 years old.
R7kGa TIL One of the methods used for identifying witches in the Salem Witch Trials, was to bake affected girls urine in a cake, feed it to a dog, and the controlling witch would then supposedly cry out in pain.
yQJWJ TIL the original comic book Superman couldn't fly but only leap tall buildings. It wasn't until the 1940s, when animators for a new animated series decided it would be too difficult to routinely draw him bending his knees, that it was decided that Superman could take off into the air.
4XGd5 TIL that when Hurricane Ivan was in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004, pressure sensors on the ocean floor detected a freak wave 91 feet tall. Computer simulations suggested that at the storm's peak as a Category 5 it was producing waves over 130 feet high.