› added 6 years ago

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TIL during the 1992 L.A. riots, police officers asked the accompanying U.S. Marines to cover them while searching a house for a suspect that held his wife and children hostage. Mistaking the statement "cover them" for suppressive fire, the Marines promptly fired 200 rounds into the house.

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ANX8a TIL in 2018, engineers with the New Jersey Department of Transportation had to reverse-engineer a steel bridge for a rehabilitation project, because the files with the original plans were destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11.
W77yB TIL in 1967, hundreds of Singaporean men panicked that their penises were disappearing into their abdomen. They were actually fine but had succumbed to a culture-bound delusion disorder known as koro, which means turtle (as in a turtle’s head retracting into its shell)
b9pO4 TIL Thomas Jefferson is credited with introducing macaroni and cheese to America, after encountering the pasta on a trip to Paris
jNwQj TIL Area 51 is just a cover. The really secret base is Area 52, the Tonopah Test Range 70 miles to the North, which is regarded by some as being the most secret covert Black Projects base in the USA.
QlNd TIL that Mormon holy books were written in faux-King James English (eg thou goeth) - the language of Bibles from Joseph Smith’s time - and contain extensive grammatical errors (eg subj-verb disagreement), suggesting that Smith was trying to make his writing sound superficially “more Biblical”