TIL that Michelle Kwan is the most decorated figure skater in US history. She is also the US ambassador to Belize.
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TIL the infamous coast-to-coast Cannonball Run challenge is named after Cannonball, the locomotive driven by Casey Jones when he fatally tried to make up a 75 minute delay and set a speed record from Memphis TN to Canton MS
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TIL after visiting Pyongyang in 1971, Romanian dictator Ceaușescu got obsessed to North Korean ideology and implemented it to his country. He was executed in 1989.
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TIL that from 1867 to 1974, various cities in the United States had laws prohibiting people deemed "unsightly" from being seen in public, retroactively being named "ugly laws".
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TIL Pigs can play video games with their snouts, scientists find
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TIL if a watermelon is beginning to foam it has a chance of exploding.
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TIL that, on being rejected by the only woman he ever proposed to, Lord William Anthony Furness, 2nd Viscount Furness, took a vow of celibacy, allowing his noble noscripts to go extinct upon his death in 1995.
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TIL that by the 1830s, American alcohol consumption had peaked at an all-time high of 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol per capita annually--more than three times the current consumption rate of 2.18 gallons (2005).
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TIL Dennis Farina started acting at 44
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TIL that the deepest mine in the world, Mponeng Gold Mine in South Africa, reaches over 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) below the Earth's surface. At such depths, temperatures can reach 60°C (140°F), requiring advanced cooling systems to keep the miners safe.
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TIL that during Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States, a Maoist American protested against him, calling him a "capitalist roader"
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TIL that Because American and British generals insisted The French unit that helped librate Paris would be all white, a white french unit had to be shipped in from Morocco, and was supplemented with soldier from Spain and Portugal. Making it all white but not all French.
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TIL Groundhog Day is noscripted in advance: members of an "Inner Circle" decide ahead of time whether Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow or not, and they announce this decision at the ceremony without waiting to see if Phil returns to his burrow or not.
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TIL Heinrich Himmler's daughter, Gudrun Burwitz, never renounced Nazi ideology, spending most of her life defending her father's reputation. She died in 2018.
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TIL Charles de Gaulle was not told about the D-Day landings until 2 days before as the British and French leaders did not believe the French could keep the information secret.
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TIL that the end of the northern part of the Pan-American Highway, (which extends all the way from Alaska to the tip of South America), abruptly ends in a nondenoscript residential neighborhood in Yaviza, Panama, north of the Darien Gap.
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TIL: The codes which allow the President of the U.S. to authorize a nuclear attack are printed on a plastic card nicknamed "the biscuit." The president is supposed to carry the biscuit at all times.
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TIL the wife of John Quincy Adams traveled the dangerous trip across war-torn Europe in 1815 to reunite with John in the UK. When she died in 1852, congress adjourned for the funeral, the first time for a woman.
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TIL Michael Crichton was 6'9" and felt socially isolated as a result.
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TIL that there are Unicode characters that represent dicks 𓂸𓏤. Unicode v5.2 introduced Egyptian hieroglyphs in 2009, and among them are the phallic hieroglyphs D52 𓂸 and D53 𓂺
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TIL about Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor who proposed putting the US nuclear codes inside a person, so that the president has no choice but to take a life to activate the country's nuclear weapons.
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