› added 10 years ago

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TIL that Stephen King’s drug and alcohol addiction was so bad that he can barely remember writing Cujo. King’s family staged an intervention, showing him evidence taken from his office including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, dextromethorphan and marijuana.

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DQgKj TIL the substance that forms the outer shell of plant spores & pollen, Sporopollenin, is one of the thoughest, most stable biopolymers in the world. It's so resistant that it can't be studied using normal enzymes or chemical reagents, and it can stay intact in sediment for +500 million years.
KOVYJ TIL of Oxdown, a fictitious village trainee journalists would write about in exams. In 2006 it was decided the exams would use real places instead, and so Oxdown was destroyed in a series of deadly explosions. Trainees had to report on the explosions.
N7vWE TIL about the Cagots, a highly persecuted minority on the French-Spanish border, who were the same ethnicity and religion as their persecutors.
Z8jYv TIL the first European explorer to see Hawaii was Captain James Cook on Nov. 26, 1778, when he and his two ships anchored offshore of Kahului. However, he did not come ashore on Maui. As Cook sailed down Maui’s northeastern coastline, a royal double-hulled canoe approached from the Hana coastline.
GAxxJ Today I learned that before their acquisition by Schneider Electric in 1991, electrical component maker Square D hadn't reported a financial loss in any calendar quarter since joining the NY Stock Exchange 55 years before -- a 220-quarter streak.