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TIL A few days before delivering the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln saw John Wilkes Booth perform as a villain in a play at Ford’s Theatre. Someone told Lincoln, “He almost seems to be reciting these lines to you.” To which Lincoln replied, “He does talk very sharp at me, doesn’t he?”

9YxLm [TIL] Thebes had a special forces military unit comprised entirely of Homosexual Couples. The belief was that couples on the battlefield would fight their hardest to protect their lovers and not flee for fear of looking weak in front of their significant others.
a89Z9 TIL about Phobos 1, a Soviet space probe launched to study Mars' moon. It shut down before ever reaching Mars because a technician left out a single hyphen in one of the keyed commands. All commands were supposed to be proofread by a computer before being transmitted, but the computer malfunctioned.
Wk08Y TIL that Alan Silvestri, composer for the soundtrack to 'Back to the Future' and 'The Avengers', learned to score a film from a book on film scoring. He bought it the night before a meeting with the producer of 'The Doberman Gang'
xX1D TIL that 2 years after Titanic sank, the Empress Of Ireland sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and lost 68.5% of all passengers (.5% more than Titanic!). The event was buried in the papers because of WWI.
0O85 TIL Before the Hummer, the US Army had over 15,000 of a little known vehicle called the “Gamma Goat”. It was designed to look like a little jeep towing a trailer, but was actually a 7000lbs single vehicle with 6 wheel drive, 4 wheel steering, and had exceptional offroad ability. But terrible on road