› added 8 months ago

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TIL messenger pigeons only fly home to where they were born and pampered. To keep them loyal, they were isolated in cages while traveling. Releasing them with a message meant they'd rush back to their luxury life. They acted as a speedy, one-way messaging service.

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0w8pR TIL after the Pope banned joining the Freemasons in 1738, a group of Catholics started their own secret society named 'The Order of the Pug' in which initiation involved wearing a collar, walking on all fours, pawing at the door to be let in, getting barked at and kissing a pug statue's butt.
WkB1X TIL velcro was invented by a Swiss electrical engineer after a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941. He took a close look at the burrs of burdock that stuck to his clothes and his dog’s fur and developed the technology for commercial use in the 1950s.
wLQnW Today I learned that the term white elephant came from the king of Thailand giving giant white elephants as gifts to people he did not like in hopes of bankrupting the receiver of the gift with the expenses of caring for an elephant.
vPeJD TIL that during the Apache Wars in the American Southwest, the Apache would cut the Army's telegraph lines but reconnect the ends together with a strip of leather to make the break in the circuit nearly impossible to find.
E1xgw TIL the Megalania, a venomous 23ft long species of giant monitor lizard, was hunted to extinction by early human inhabitants of Ice Age Australia.