› added 11 years ago

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TIL there was no winner for the “Who Shot Mr. Burns” contest on The Simpsons. The contest rules said that a winner would be selected from the pool of people who guessed correctly, but there were no correct guesses.

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0m4L TIL when three men with machetes came into an African orphanage at night, a man named Omari took a hammer to fight all three at once. He survived after getting hit in the face with a machete, and saved all of the children. His story, first shared on Reddit, helped raise $83,000 for the orphanage.
W7JG8 TIL Plastic trash bags weren't widely available until the late 1960s. The drawstring was introduced in 1984.
ep68D TIL that at one of the WWII death camps the prisoners rose up & killed most of the guards. After about 300 escaped, fear of discovery led officials try to hide their war crimes by ordering that the camp be closed & sold to a forestry service, who planted trees there.
yBap TIL the Polish Beer-Lovers’ Party (PPPP) won 16 seats in the Sejm with 2.97% of the vote in the first free parliamentary elections in 1991, before disintegrating into Large Beer and Small Beer factions despite party president Rewiński’s claims that “beer is neither light nor dark, it is tasty.”
GAn61 TIL a minority of the world's languages are "ergative"—the object of a transitive verb & the subject of an intransitive verb are treated the same. For example: whereas in English we'd say "SHE likes HER" & "SHE walks"; in Basque (spoken in N. Spain/SW France), it'd be "SHE likes HER" but "HER walks"