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TIL of Ranald MacDonald, a Chinook/Scotsman from Oregon Country, who went to Japan in 1848 despite its strict isolationist policy. Risking death, he pretended to be shipwrecked & got captured. While imprisoned, the gov't sent 14 samurai to be his pupils, as he became Japan's first English teacher.

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jNBVp TIL In 1974 Larry Flynt purchased pictures of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis nude for $18,000 and published them in the August 1975 issue of Hustler. That issue made him an overnight millionaire.
7rbjx TIL that the world's oldest prosthetic device, an artificial wooden toe was found on a 3,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian woman in 1997. Now, researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland have learned a great deal about how the toe functioned, what it's made of, and how it was fabricated.
kO5n4 TIL: Lego illegally copied the iconic brick designs of Hilary Page whom committed suicide due to lack of sales for his Self-Locking Building Bricks prior to realizing his designs were even being copied.
ne5DG TIL in the 2000 paralympics, the Spanish team in basketball-ID consisted of fully functional semi-pros. They won gold by a landslide but where discovered because one of the players was an undercover journalist investigating fraud comitted by the president of the Spanish Disabled Sports Federation.
0ZNy TIL Jon Lovitz blames Andy Dick for causing Phil Hartman’s wife to relapse after a decade of sobriety of cocaine which led to a downward spiral leading to killing herself and her husband.