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TIL: Rodents cannot vomit which is why poison is such an effective way of getting rid of them

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mxBGo TIL about crossed letters, they consist of two different sets of writing, one written horizontally and the other perpendicularly. This was done during the early days of the postal system in the 19th century to save on expensive postage charges and to save paper.
160k8 TIL of Kurt Gerstein, a Nazi officer who tried to alert the world of the Holocaust while it was happening by sending detailed reports to Swedish, Swiss, Dutch and Catholic officials. These were largely ineffective and he died by suicide in 1945
E1RBW TIL in WWII, the Allies lost more troops in the rehearsal operations for D-Day than on the day itself.
mxE4v TIL witches were never depicted with green skin before the 1939 Wizard of Oz film. Witches were commonly depicted as red or orange beforehand. The Wicked Witch of the West was not described as green in the book, and she was only made green in the film because it looked really good in technicolor.
LQlo0 TIL: about the 1871 Peshtigo WI Fire. It was far worse than the great Chicago fire that burned on the same day. The fire consumed 17 entire cities and over 1.2 million acres, leaving up to 2,500 dead. The dead were buried in mass graves because there was no one left to identify the bodies.