› added 10 months ago

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TIL Of the vegetable lamb of tartary. How northern Europeans explained cotton in the middle ages.

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KOrJ6 TIL: The UN Child Convention, which protects children (people under 18), has been accepted by all 195 countries in the world, except South Sudan and the United States.
awoVJ TIL a bunch of friends and family tried to help Steve-O overcome his drug addiction and failed. One time he got so high on Nitrous Oxide that he hallucinated a formal intervention to help him out.
rRjvo TIL Walt Disney tried to join WW1 so he can fight the Germans but was rejected because he was to young so he forged the date of birth on his birth certificate, and joined the Red Cross to become an ambulance driver.
r8Wd TIL Philip II (father of Alexander the Great) threatened Sparta with “if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”. The Spartans simply replied with “if.”. neither Philip or Alexander attempted to capture the city.
8aKgb TIL Quarantine is from Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning "forty days", used in 14th-15th-century Venetian dialect and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic