› added 9 years ago

95

TIL James Earl Jones stuttered so bad as a child that he was functionally mute for 8 years until an English teacher in High School discovered he had a gift for poetry and helped him end his silence.

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W7wm8 TIL that in 2004 the owner of the Marineland amusement park in Canada purchased a nearby trailer park for an expansion and evicted all 47 families living there, leading to the suicide of 63 year old Paula Millard. The expansion never happened and the lot is still abandoned.
p81kp TIL 'CQD' was the international distress symbol before 'SOS'
neXpY TIL the inventor of the GameBoy and Duck Hunt, Gunpei Yokoi, died in his fifties after rear ending someone and then being hit by a car when he went to check on them.
0wxRj TIL about the Thames Barrier, which helps protect London from storm surge flooding
X0aDR TIL that the H.R.152 - Hearing Protection Act is actually about gun silencers and removes silencers from the definition of firearms for purposes of the National Firearms Act.