› added 11 years ago

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TIL M. Night Shyamalan once watched Nickelodeon kid show ‘Are You Afraid Of The Dark?’, and particularly enjoyed an episode called “The Tale of the Dream Girl”, which is about a kid who can communicate with the dead. The episode would influence him to write the screenplay for The Sixth Sense.

5VDLD TIL that horses and sheeps with horizontal pupils can rotate their eyeballs so as to keep their horizontal pupils parallel to the ground, which helps them identify predators
xVRew TIL that the US is NOT in the top 10 most obese countries in the world (by obesity rate). The top 10 are all Pacific Islands, #11 is Kuwait, and #12 is USA
wROE TIL that after his presidency, Harry Truman refused to join any corporate boards or do commercial endorsements, feeling that using the presidency for financial gain would diminish the integrity of the office. Congress eventually passed the Former Presidents Act to pay him a pension.
b60y4 Til the AD 17 Lydia earthquake caused the destruction of at least twelve cities in the region of Asia Minor (Turkey). Roman Emperor Tiberius agreed to waive all taxes due from the cities hit by the earthquake and sent aid to help restore them.
lR7B TIL Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He quit the group less than two years later. In 1875 he was invited to give a speech before an organization of black Southerners advocating racial reconciliation and equality. (Speech in Comments)