› added 1 year ago

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TIL that publications keep "advance obituaries" for notable individuals in order to have large well-written articles as quickly as possible. Not only do these regularly get published early in error, but P.T. Barnum requested his be published early so he could read them on his deathbed. They did.

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yQWOa TIL that in 2013 a French businessman died of a heart attack while having sex with a stranger while on a business trip. A French court subsequently ruled that this was an industrial accident and that his wife and family were entitled to compensation
GlXg TIL In 1979 a scholar in Semitic languages from the University of Manchester published a book claiming that the word “Jesus” in the bible has been misinterpreted and that it is really a code for a certain species of hallucinogenic mushroom
d8nwQ TIL that a Guard Llama is a real thing, not a joke. They are used in the Western USA by ranchers to guard livestock.
OG8gX TIL the 1922 film Nosferatu was such a blatant rip off of Bram Stoker's Dracula that Bram's widow won a lawsuit demanding all copies of the film be destroyed. A single copy found its way to America, where Dracula was in the public domain due to copyright error, allowing the film to survive.
ekPb TIL in the middle of the Savannah International Airport lies a 200 year old grave in the runway, marked because the family was reluctant to move the graves to another location while the airport was urgently built to use for bombers during WW2.