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TIL jazz musician Artie Shaw, leader of one of the most popular big bands of the 30s and 40s, was married and divorced 8 times, the first 7 of which averaged less than 2 years each.

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BrZRr TIL In 1964, Zambian teacher and freedom fighter Edward Mukuka Nkoloso started a space program. Weightlessness training involved rolling downhill in an oil drum, flight was planned to be via catapulting from a tree and the crew consisted of a 16 year old girl, a Christian missionary and some cats.
WkVO8 TIL there is an french delicacy in which an ortolan songbird is caught in a cage, forced to gorge on grain, drowned in cognac, and then consumed while covering your head with a napkin to hide your shame from god.
mpXE TIL: After 18+ years marooned on an island, the real-life heroine the novel The Island of the Blue Dolphins died just 7 weeks after being rescued
LJM9 TIL that The Samurai was a Japanese series that was dubbed and aired in Australia, the first Japanese program to ever screen in the country. It became so popular that when lead actor Ose Koichi visited Melbourne, he was greeted by a crowd larger than that which had greeted The Beatles in 1964.
jNaYv TIL: The Canadian government took 150,000 indigenous children from there families and placed them in church run schools to forcibly assimilate them.