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TIL in 1976 a novel about “a lonely librarian in northern Ontario who enters into a sexual relationship with a bear” won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award

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EgWAo TIL in Apartheid South Africa, being black or white was sometimes determined by shoving a pencil into a person's hair and checking to see if it fell out when shaking their head, or by pinching them to see what language they would say "ouch" in
4JYN TIL: A blonde, blue eyed Frenchman convinced 18th-C London that he was from Taiwan. He wrote a best-selling book about his “homeland” filled with bizarre facts, including a fake alphabet and language. He became the most famous “Asian” in England. In other words, the greatest troll of the 1700s.
v1mwj TIL of 'Osterns' or 'Red Westerns.' A genre of film originating from Russia and the Eastern Bloc. Emulating and drawing from American Westerns.
a8eyo TIL that a loose checklist killed 11 soldiers. In 2015, a Greek F-16 crashed after takeoff, killing the crew and nine Frenchmen on the ground; 25 French, Italians, and Americans were injured. A checklist likely got jammed next to the yaw knob, causing the fighter to roll uncontrollably to the right.
D1NNY TIL an American man built a log cabin in Alaska and then just kept adding more and more floors until he reached 185-feet. At this point, he was forced to stop building as federal airspace starts at 200 feet. In the future, he still intends to squeeze in one more floor.