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TIL Central Park’s rivers and streams are entirely artificial and can be turned on and off.

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rrpd TIL the difference between white and dark meat is due to the difference in fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles, respectively. This is why ground-based birds like chickens and turkeys have white meat for breasts and wings while flying birds like duck and geese have dark meat.
awkOZ TIL: The "tradition" of spending several months salary on an engagement ring was a marketing campaign created by De Beers in the 1930's. Before WWII, only 10% of engagement rings contained diamonds. By the end of the 20th Century, 80% did.
kOaAW TIL Cows in America are being fed candy such as Skittles as a cheap alternative to corn, which came to the general public's attention early 2017 after a news story broke about a truck that spilled hundreds of thousands of Skittles onto a road in Wisconsin.
KYg96 TIL: In 1990, Tom Stuker bought a lifetime pass from United Airlines for $290,000. He has since flown 23 million miles and calls the purchase the 'best investment' of his life.
Z8jOp TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.