› added 6 years ago

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TIL before his death, author Robert Louis Stevenson gifted his friends daughter his own birthday. The daughter had been born on Christmas, and complained she felt like she had no real birthday

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VMwg8 TIL that Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.
XEZXP TIL that the A340 that used to fly the world's longest commercial flight from NY to Singapore had lockers onboard to store any corpses that died mid-flight as there were few places they could divert
yMPV TIL of a statistician who discovered the outside of a particular scratch-off lottery game was non random. He could correctly predict a winning ticket 90% of the time.
lobpK TIL That Medival Europeans thought that a brownstone supposedly found in old toads heads could cure almost any poison and the stones were often made into highly prized jewelry. These stones were in fact fossils dating from the Jurassic/Cretaceous period and had no curative properties.
oB1WE TIL because of a 1954 report on illiteracy, Houghton Mifflin's edu director gave Theodor Geisel with a list of 348 words he thought 1st graders should learn, asking Geisel to cut it down to 250 and to use those words to write a book. Geisel returned using 236 of them in his book, The Cat in the Hat.