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TIL about the Royal Hawaiian Navy, which consisted of a single ship, HHMS Kaimiloa, and existed for about 5 months, from March to August of 1887. She only had a single mission- to sail to Samoa to seek an alliance. That mission failed, mostly due to colonial ambitions of world powers at the time.

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XrMj TIL the Allied operation to conceal the D-Day Invasion involved fake radio traffic, double agents, an Australian actor, and fake invasion plans for Calais, Norway, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans. It was so effective Hitler believed the real invasion hadn’t begun until seven weeks after D-Day.
b9na0 TIL: When David Levy was born in Morocco with the rare congenital condition of aposthia- having no foreskin- the local rabbis prophesied he’d be the leader of the Jewish people. He ended up serving three terms as deputy prime minister of Israel.
xxj0 TIL that ‘Mad Men’ understated its depiction of drinking, smoking, and sex in 1960s Manhattan. Advertising veteran Jerry Della Femina said that “Three-martini lunches were the norm … The only thing that saved us was that the clients and agencies that we were going back to drank as much as we did”.
RjY8 TIL that in 1958 the US government funded a experiment to try to get dolphins to talk with humans by having a human and dolphin live together. When the dolphin went through adolescence he tried courting the woman, and she began to give him hand jobs, which made him more receptive to the lessons.
XNnk TIL Some breakfast cereals, like Wheaties, are fortified with enough iron that individual flakes can be lifted and carried using common magnets.