› added 4 years ago

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TIL that the longest single "conflict" was the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years War, allegedly between the Netherlands and the Isle of Scilly, extended by a lack of a peace treaty for 335 years, without a shot ever being fired.

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5VmPQ TIL that Dire Straits's bassist John Illsley owns a pub in Hampshire which was rated as one of the "Fifty Best Pubs Around Britain" by the Times. He has also decorated the pub with his own paintings.
Z8LbD TIL the Anglo-Moroccan alliance in 1601 discussed a joint attack on the Spanish in their American colonies, with a view to setting up predominantly Moroccan colonies.
14e7 TIL Nazi Germany produced Chlorine Trifluoride for use as a dual purpose incendiary and poison gas in WW2. ClF3 causes almost anything to spontaneously explode on contact, including wood, concrete, sand, gravel, glass, asbestos, water, and of course flesh.
Qg0d TIL Sesame Street’s Count Von Count’s counting obsession come from a traditional vampire myths that depicts vampires as having a fixation with counting small objects. In the myth, the fixation often provides a means of distracting them by tossing a handful of seeds or salt on the ground.
W7Q78 Til of E Henry Knoche, A former star college tennis and basketball athlete, he asked for a job with the CIA with no qualifications other than his trophies, 2 years with the navy during WW2 and speaking Russian and an obscure Chinese dialect. When he retired in 1977 he was acting director of the CIA