› added 4 years ago

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TIL there ARE bears in India. People always made jokes about Baloo in the Jungle book: "Why's there a random bear in the jungle?" B/c as is turns out, there are Sloth Bears native to about all of India.

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ANdMg TIL that, while the passenger pigeon had a range across multiple U.S. states, the largest nesting sites were recorded in Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1870s, but the bird went extinct in the wild by 1902. The extinction of the passenger pigeon is also tied to the modern Lyme disease epidemic.
5yGr TIL that the four vultures in Disney’s The Jungle Book were both designed after and originally supposed to be voiced by The Beatles.
47Ea TIL one of the countermeasures against war elephants was to douse some pigs with oil or resin, set them alight, and drive them towards the enemy’s elephants. The elephants would bolt in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of soldiers by trampling them to death.
5YxkP TIL Bud Abbott, of Abbott and Costello, quit school at the age of ten. One of his first jobs was shilling for a house of mirrors on Coney Island, when people inevitably got lost in the maze of mirrors he would charge 10 cents to guide them out.
1a8AX TIL Congress can write laws that apply to only a particular person or entity. While a majority of laws passed by Congress apply to all people Congress has authority over, a small number of “Private Laws” are passed by Congress every few years, usually to grant specific relief actions.