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TIL that Empress Kōken of Japan nearly made a buddhist monk Dōkyō her successor on the throne. This would have broken the line of Japanese monarchs all being descendants of Amaterasu, and completely shifted the Imperial dynasty forever.

jg1Q TIL in 2011, in response to employees’ complaints about work-life balance and the expectations of answering after-hours email from home, Volkswagen agreed to implement a rule restricting company email functionality on the firm’s BlackBerry smartphones from 6:30pm-7:30am.
8NDG TIL: The Third World was so named during the Cold War to describe countries not aligned with the US or USSR, and had nothing to do with poverty
V89p TIL: When Paris was liberated in 1944, British and American commanders wanted only white soldiers be involved in the leading French unit, despite the french army being only 40% white - all black soldiers were taken out of an available unit and replaced by white ones from other units.
olD7 TIL that “The Case of the Stolen Smell” - an innkeeper accused a poor student of “stealing his smell” by eating while the innkeeper was cooking to “flavor” his dull food. The judge ordered the student to pay the innkeeper with the sound of money by passing it from one hand to another.
b97mp TIL that the Roman Emperor Nero did not play the fiddle as he watched the Great Fire burn Rome. When the fire broke out he was at his villa in Antium, 35 miles away. When he received news of the fire he immediately rushed back to Rome to begin relief efforts.