› added 1 year ago

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TIL Peljidiin Genden 9th Prime Minister of Mongolia was brought to Moscow to meet Stalin and shouted "You bloody Georgian, you have become a virtual Russian Czar". Genden then reportedly slapped Stalin, broke his pipe, and hinted that Mongolia was considering an alliance with the Empire of Japan.

Gnw4 TIL that Thanksgiving was made a national holiday because one woman obsessively campaigned to make it so until eventually President Lincoln agreed. The same woman also wrote “Mary had a little lamb” and lobbied for the creation of the Bunker Hill memorial.
jNrpv TIL about ‘the bloody Benders’, America’s first serial killer family. They are known to have killed 11 people between 1868 and 1872, luring each of them into their hotel in Cherryvale, Kansas. They disappeared before their crimes were discovered and were never seen again.
nWkXB TIL that the man who physically wrote the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, died because of an infection of a wound that he sustained while using a piece of whale baleen as a catheter in an attempt to clear a blockage in his urinary tract.
0d87R TIL of the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing "automaton" from the 1700s actually operated by a cleverly hidden human. It toured the palaces of Europe, even playing against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, who attempted to cheat multiple times, prompting the Turk to swipe all the pieces off the board.
Lpv TIL That men do NOT think about sex every seven seconds. In fact, it is impossible to accurately measure how often anyone thinks about anything.