› added 3 years ago

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TIL about Makuragaeshi which are Japanese spirits that visit people at night to flip their pillows over. They're mentioned in stories from the Edo period to modern times. In ancient Japan, they believed the soul left the body during dreams and that it couldn't return if the pillow was flipped.

QJBM TIL that Karen Carpenter died on the same day that her divorce was supposed to be finalized. At her funeral her husband took off his wedding ring and threw it into her casket.
GYvr1 TIL that while writing the popular 1990s song Friday I'm in Love, The Cure frontman Robert Smith became convinced that he stole the tune from somewhere, and was so paranoid that he called every person he knew and played the song for them, asking if they recognized it. It was, indeed, unique.
Aer4 TIL that Leon Trotsky wrote a book called “The Revolution Betrayed” where he accurately predicted the deterioration of communism, Stalin’s totalitarianism, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union
K4MG TIL Islamic history has largely been indifferent of homosexuality. In 1858, homosexuality was legalised in the Ottoman Empire, who ruled much of the Sunni world. Modern rejection and criminalization of “homosexuality in Islam gained momentum through the effects of European colonialism.
LZyv TIL that “frequency illusion,” somewhat better known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, is what you call the syndrome in which a concept or thing you just found out about suddenly seems to appear everywhere.