› added 7 years ago

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TIL The Czech Republic changed their name to Czechia without running it by their citizens first. The name has been overwhelming unpopular amongst Czechs.

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Z1WR TIL James Cameron made the movie Titanic to get a dive to the shipwreck funded by the movie studio; not because he particularly wanted to make the movie.
M77L7 TIL about “The Open Veins of Latin America,” a seminal historical analysis on resource exploitation since the Conquistadors, and how precious metal mining for bullets and aircraft feeds the Northern hemisphere’s depletion of resources and people from the Rio Grande to the Amazon
y7R8 TIL Heracles was killed by his naïve wife Deianira with a shirt given to her by a centaur who tried to rape her.
E1PAV TIL of “Tokyo Rose” aka “Orphan Ann” aka Iva Toguri D'Aquino who in WWII used double entendres to make a farce of Japanese propaganda on her radio show “The Zero Hour” and used part of her $7 a month paycheck to smuggle food to POWs
MepV8 TIL that the Egyptians' system of taxation was based on usable land area, and you could claim a reduction in tax based on the surface area that dipped underwater when the Nile flooded.