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TIL in 1946 the Soviet Union built a secret city called City 40 to house workers of a nearby nuclear plant and their families. For decades the fenced city and its 100k inhabitants were officially non existent. Today the city is called Ozersk and it's been exposed to 5x the radiation of Chernobyl.

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via reddit.com

VZM4 TIL that the OED included a trap, made up word, “Esquivalience” which it defined to mean “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities” as a copyright infringement trap which caught both Dictionary.com and Google Dictionary.
VoPk TIL that in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote an editorial about President Lincoln’s suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. He was subsequently imprisoned and held without trial for two years at Fort McHenry, where his grandfather Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner during the War of 1812
rRMOd TIL that Nicolas Cage was supposed to play the role of Aragon in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy
ldON TIL learned that studio execs balked when Jim Carrey asked for $400,000 for Dumb and Dumber. Then Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out and the studio had to pay Carrey $7 million to do the movie!
OoV8e TIL a New Jersey man was once charged $3,750 for a bottle of wine after the waitress recommended the one that was "thirty-seven fifty."