› added 7 months ago

19

TIL that there is an actual city of Townsville in Australia.

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9lXr TIL Winston Churchill once defined tact as “the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such as way that they look forward to the trip.”
p8nkO TIL of the biblical practice of shmita - every seven years, farmland would be left fallow. Any crops that grew were free for the taking by all, and all debts were negated.
MRJ0 TIL there is a term for “cousin killing,” just not a single one because Latin has distinct words for paternal and maternal cousins. They would be “patruelicide” and “sobrinicide” respectively.
JEnv TIL actress Mercedes McCambridge who dubbed the voice of the demon in The Exorcist swallowed raw eggs, chain smoked and drank whiskey to make her voice harsh. She was bound to a chair during recordings and requested no credit for the film.
rRGM4 TIL of Dennis H. Klatt, a computer scientist who programmed Stephen Hawking's voice box. He tirelessly worked on the code while undergoing treatment for cancer, which eventually took his own voice, and his life. Hawking never changed his voice program, saying, "My friend Dennis' voice is my voice"