› added 5 years ago

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TIL that in 1704, George Psalmanazar, who claimed to be from Taiwan, published a book in Britain about Taiwanese customs. As nothing was known about Taiwan in Europe at the time, his claims (such as that if a Taiwanese woman cheated on her husband, he could legally eat her) were widely believed.

e0lgL TIL that the reason there was a talking robot in Rocky 4 was because Stallone used that robot at home to help his autistic son, so he wrote it into the script so that he could have his son on set with his robot and care worker
R7o18 TIL that Dr. Seuss was childless, but invented a whole clan of fictional offspring with bizarre talents that he could bring up whenever friends annoyed him by boasting about their own kids' accomplishments. He even got a group of neighborhood kids into posing as them for a fake Christmas card photo
oBx6A TIL BMW holds the world record for longest (water assisted) drift at 232.5 miles in which they preformed mid-drift refueling five times breaking a second record for longest twin vehicle drift.
D1gED TIL: About “Garden Path Sentences”, a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. Like “The old man the boat”
QJALp TIL Ketamine was given to boys trapped in a cave to keep them unconscious & to prevent them from panicking during their six day rescue