› added 8 years ago

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TIL that when the US navy banned alcohol on ships in July 1914, they held one last massive party and invited ships from several nations to help drink the last of the booze. Many of the participants in the party would become enemies weeks later when WWI broke out.

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VBj70 TIL in 2018 after a man bought a storage unit for $500 from 'Storage Wars' auctioneer Dan Dotson, he discovered a safe within it contained $7.5m in cash. When the original owners of the unit found out, they first offered him $600K to return the rest of the loot, but settled on giving him $1.2m.
k5kB TIL 1992 an officer in the Soviet KGB defected to the west brining with him thousands of notes he took during his career in the KGB archives. These notes reveal the KGB’s hand in framing the US government for the Kennedy assassination, spreading the rumor that AIDs was a US invention, and much more.
NM7Q TIL some deep sea sea cucumbers can slough off their bioluminscent skin upon contact, thus turning their predators into targets
XE8JQ TIL in the rushed rampup to train military pilots during World War II from a thousand graduates in 1939 to hundreds of thousands by 1945, over 15,000 Americans died in nearly 30,000 crashes in stateside training alone
e0AV4 TIL Pres. Ronald Reagan was a huge fan of Jelly Beans and once wrote to the head of Jelly Belly, saying "It's gotten to the point...where we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around a jar of jelly beans"