› added 12 years ago

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TIL that the Ostrich-Egg Globe may be the oldest globe, dated 1504, to depict the New World, engraved with immaculate detail on two conjoined halves of ostrich eggs.

9Y7bM TIL Buster Keaton's film The Navigator (1924) was filmed on the USAT Buford. The ship had previously been used for the First Red Scare, as the "Soviet Ark" to deport 249 "undesirables" from the United States to revolutionary Russia, among them the noted anarchist Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
dERr TIL Dr. Oz has been the recipient of the “Pigasus Award for Refusal to Face Reality” at least three times, and has also been supportive of faith healing and communication with the dead.
LkxGQ TIL Paul Newman, while attending a small college in central Ohio, began a laundry service out of his dorm room. Newman’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning Service was a success, earning the young entrepreneur the nickname “The Laundry Man of T-Barracks” in 1949.
XE4VR TIL British spymaster Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first head of the MI6 and the inspiration of James Bond's M, started the practice of using semen as invisible ink during WWI. It worked well, until they realised that the letters smelled awful when received.
R5rw9 TIL that 2500 years ago, an explorer named Hanno found a tribe of ‘hairy and savage’ people. He captured three women, but they were so ferocious that he had them killed and skinned. It’s speculated that he actually discovered gorillas. Gorillas were named after his name for the tribe.