› added 1 year ago

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TIL about the Muammar Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, which was created by the eponymous dictator to “bestow tribute upon symbolic figures of struggle and faith in the values of freedom to all humans”. The first recipient was Nelson Mandela.

5YQPr TIL that Supreme Court Justice John Harlan and Supreme Court Justice Horace Lurton were in a Civil War gun battle on opposite sides and found out they tried to kill each other in that battle, during one of their dinners together.
JEj4 TIL the Slinky was conceived of in 1943 by Richard James. While working at a shipbuilding company, he watched a torsion spring fall off a table and flip end over end. His wife came up with the name Slinky after looking through the dictionary for a word that described the motion of the spring.
R7a TIL Apollo 11 Astronauts went through customs upon returning from the moon.
R7o18 TIL that Dr. Seuss was childless, but invented a whole clan of fictional offspring with bizarre talents that he could bring up whenever friends annoyed him by boasting about their own kids' accomplishments. He even got a group of neighborhood kids into posing as them for a fake Christmas card photo
J1vN1 TIL the fictional languages in the Game of Thrones series are fully complete languages. Of all the actors that had to speak one or more of them, the person that portrayed the Grey Worm character was considered the best/most talented. He was skilled enough to speak like a natural native speaker.