› added 12 years ago

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TIL the British Armed Forces still have 21500 troops stationed in Germany - due to the establishment of the British Army of the Rhine after WWII. Only in 2020 will these troops be withdrawn.

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gMpy7 TIL Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter was an aspiring mycologist when the prestigious Linnean Society rejected her submitted paper on fungi reproduction because she was a woman. 100 years later (and 54 years after her death), they formally apologized for their sexist treatment of her work
4k9wX Til that the movie adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm was financed by the C.I.A.
pYdK8 TIL Kellog's Corn Pops cereal was named Sugar Pops until 1984 and featured the mascot Sugar Pops Pete blasting sugar on the cereal with a pistol.
yQjAM TIL that there have been several cases of whale carcasses bursting due to a buildup of gas in the decomposition process. In Nov 1970, when a dead whale was about to burst, a team blew it up using dynamite in an attempt to dispose of it. The explosion threw whale flesh over 800 feet (240 M) away!
d8j9E TIL that the distance from the top of Africa to the bottom (5000 miles) is the same distance as London to Beijing, China (5055 miles). Senegal in west Africa is closer to Jamaica across the Atlantic than Somalia in east Africa.