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TIL In 1828, 40-year-old artist Sarah Goodridge painted a miniature portrait of her own breasts imbued with a "paleness and buoyancy" and gave it to a U.S. Senator she may have wanted to marry. His family kept it for over 50 years and it now hangs at the Met Museum.

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v1nWj TIL that there was a spin-off of Columbo called "Mrs. Columbo" in which Peter Falk and his character Frank Columbo never makes an appearance, despite being the main character's husband.
4k6yN TIL that during Star Trek filming, censors required actresses not to show their navels. Gene Roddenberry was so irked by this that he made the villains in his 1973 TV movie "Genesis II" identifiable by each having two navels, thus filming each navel he’d previously been forced to censor twice over.
5YGQr TIL A solar filtered telescope with a magnification of 50x to 100x is needed to be able to see the transit of Venus across the sun. Binoculars with 7x magnification can also project an image that shows Venus as a very tiny black dot on the disc of the sun
kOYad TIL of Robert Smalls, a slave who freed himself his crew & their families by overtaking Confederate ship, CSS Planter, and sailing it north. The ship contained a code book letting them pass CSA checkpoints. He became new captain of the ship & convinced Lincoln to admit African Americans to the Army
9jYr TIL there is a thin wire that circles Manhatten (and other cities) that permits Orthodox Jews to act as if they were inside their home for their day of rest.