› added 10 months ago

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TIL the German airline Lufthansa is derived from Luft meaning air and Hansa, the trading empire that dominated Europe in the Middle Ages.

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N7oO8 TIL that Scheherazade, the storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights tells her stories (Aladdin, Sinbad, ...) to the monarch so that he would stop marrying and killing a new virgin every day after his first wife betrayed him. He had already killed 1001 women when they met.
m1kLo TIL that after the radio station KARW held a large Beatles bonfire to protest John Lennon's "We're more popular than Jesus" comment, only for a lightning bolt to strike its transmission tower the following day and send the station temporarily off-air.
QJBAE TIL margins in books are literally meant for taking notes. The practice (in books) started in the renaissance when people who copied the bible would leave space at the edges of their pages to write notes.
1VnD TIL that when Robert Bloch wrote a story killing off Cthulu, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a story killing off Robert Bloch.
XEwek TIL of Richard Rich, a Catholic who supported, under Henry VIII, the destruction of monasteries and execution of monks. He gave testimony obtained through promises of friendship to execute clergy and personally tortured a Protestant woman. He is seen as one of the worst people in English history.