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TIL Abe Lincoln once threw a man by the “neck and seat of his pants” for attacking a supporter during his first speech for Illinois General Assembly.

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W7dZ4 TIL Howard Hughes was a chronic insomniac who wanted to watch movies on TV when most people were asleep, but when he first arrived in Las Vegas he discovered that it had no all-night TV stations. So he purchased a local station in 1967 and turned it into a 24/7 channel.
X0vyP TIL: the cover of Caldor's 1998 "Toy Book" holiday ad featured two boys playing Scrabble. One of the words on the board was "RAPE."
gVg4 TIL in 1971, Saddam Hussein imported 95,000 tons of grain treated with fungicidal mercury. The grain was intended for planting, but the Iraqis, unable to understand the English and Spanish warnings or the “skull and crossbones” image, baked it into bread. Hundreds died.
X0ZD6 TIL in 1931 a 15 year old went to a hospital in Chicago and was mistakenly given a transfusion of blood from a parrot because the physician misheard the doctor’s instruction to “use her parents’ blood.” The hospital staff frantically searched for a parrot and extracted its blood for injection
ADj0l TIL of Elouise Cobell (“Yellow Bird Woman”) who founded the first Native American owned bank. As treasurer of the Blackfeet Nation she tried to resolve accounting discrepancies regarding leases on Indian Land which led to a $3.4 Billion dollar class action settlement against the US government.