› added 8 years ago

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TIL that as a child, the French designer Christian Louboutin, being darker-skinned than the rest of his family, invented his own history of being Egyptian, due to his fascination with Pharaohs. At the age of 50, Louboutin discovered that his biological father was in fact an Egyptian man.

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5Grn TIL that Betty Crocker never existed as a real person, and her image has changed to match the tastes of the American public.
9YZYQ TIL that in 2005, the Republic of Fiji lost it's declaration of independence from Britain. After five long years of searching, Fiji's government finally turned to Britain, who provided them with a photocopy.
wLZvE TIL that in 1999, 40 million people suddenly lost power in the Philippines, igniting fears of a possible military coup, only to find out that the cooling pipes of one power grid had sucked up 50 dump truck’s worth of jellyfish which caused the outage.
mQXY TIL that Werner Heisenberg and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler were school friends. When the SS began persecuting Heisenberg, Heisneberg’s mother called Himmler’s mother to ask that the SS stop. They did.
AD66l TIL about CRAF, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. It requires some airlines to reserve a portion of their fleet for military deployments that are on-call & ready within 24-48hrs, should demand exceed military resources. Lately, it is one of the reasons why the govt. will continue bail out the airlines.