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TIL Le Pétomane was a French professional farter. His act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through his anus. He could also blow out a candle yards away. His audience included royalty and Sigmund Freud.

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mxgoO TIL Some of the oldest preserved female litterature come from poems by early Buddhist nuns in 6th century BCE (2500 years ago!). The women express their spiritual equality to men, and issues such as child mortality. They also discuss the role and abilities women in society
gGDy TIL that shops in Japan place orange balls of paint near the register as an anti-crime device. The staff throws the ball at the criminal, which explodes on impact and stains the criminal with distinctive orange paint for the police to easily identify.
6EBMQ TIL Stephen Hawking once sent his PhD student away with a very hard problem – finding exact rotating black hole solutions of Einstein’s equations with a cosmological constant – and was stunned when he came back a few days later with the solution
kEr7 TIL of the “Well to Hell” hoax, where it was reported than a group of Russian engineers (while drilling into the ground) broke into Hell, and screams of the damned could be heard. The Trinity Broadcasting Network ran with the story and claimed it proved the existence of Hell.
M7joa TIL that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930's, meant to boost US manufacturing and farming, amplied the Great Depression's impact by collapsing global trade.