TIL that there was an urban legend about a Japan baseball team that had 18-year losing streak because in the 80's they threw the statue of Colonel Sanders into the river. https://ift.tt/HMGdvno

TIL In China, Hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people are shackled or locked in cages at home because their families can't cope with their behavior. https://ift.tt/bWtXNog

TIL: FDR, until his death, investigated the Oak Island Mystery. A collection of lost treasure in Canada that has been rumored for centuries. The money pit was said to contain artifacts from the Knights Templar or Captain Kidd. There has been several investors over the years, including John Wayne. https://ift.tt/CsikF0g

TIL the last on-screen appearance Orson Welles ever made was on the TV show *Moonlighting*, where he read an introduction to assure audiences that the sudden shift to black-and-white is not a sign there is something wrong with their televisions. https://ift.tt/2n3Vdo1

TIL the hacker group anonymous tried to hack a mexican cartel and had to back down after the cartel hired counter hackers to hunt them down https://ift.tt/wfz5ESx

TIL that Essex police firearms officers in the UK have not had to fire a single shot in over 8 years, and responded to over 500 incidents this year. https://ift.tt/hfQYmPX

TIL that there is an annual income requirement of 2000 pesos to become president of Argentina, placed in 1853. However since its not adjusted for inflation its the equivalent of $2.50 today instead of the original 3.3 kg of gold ($220,000) https://ift.tt/ZfBN5t0

TIL that only three one-letter .com domains in existence: q.com, x.com and z.com. They were registered before 1992 and grandfathered in, but ICANN banned any corporation from being able to own any of the other 23 letters one letter domains. https://ift.tt/IA8fdNk

TIL, "Ratfucking" which means the pillaging of the most desirable part of Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) is common in the US military. In this situation, the more senior personnel will open up the packages, take the best ones of each MRE packages while leaving the trash ones for the newbies. https://ift.tt/fBASENU

TIL of Anton-Babinski syndrome, a form of blindness from damage to the brain—cortical blindness, where the patient firmly denies their loss of vision, as the disconnection between speech and visual pathways causes them to lose the concept of sight, filling in gaps with hallucinations—confabulations. https://ift.tt/UDWMau8

TIL that because earthquakes kept destroying Spanish-built buildings like churches, houses, and settlements in Colonial era Philippines, a new architectural style was created solely to withstand the tremors——Earthquake Baroque. https://ift.tt/1MUX9NQ

TIL Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of LEGO, taught his son Godtfred a lesson about quality, by making him finish the final coat of varnish on a consignment of wooden ducks by himself. Godtfred had tried to save the company money by only using 2 coats. https://ift.tt/VCmZJ4f

TIL 19 Choctaw Native Americans were first used on the front lines and in command posts in World War 1 because their language was unknown to the Germans who were listening in https://ift.tt/yUkCOLm

TIL the lunar temperature was 93ºC (200ºF) at the landing site of Apollo 11. https://ift.tt/GF1o0jW

TIL that Able Archer 83 was a war exercise conducted by NATO that panicked the Soviets into thinking they were really being attacked and so nearly launched a nuclear retaliation in response; it is now considered to be the nearest that mankind went into nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis https://ift.tt/2M3OX8I

TIL that MTV, the former home to music videos, now primarily airs *Ridiculousness*, during a stretch of 168 hours in late June 2020, 113 hours of programming were gobbled up by the show and during one weekend in August, episodes ran for more than 36 hours uninterrupted. https://ift.tt/RDi8Wwk

TIL Since 2011, Chinese astronauts are officially banned from visiting the International Space Station https://ift.tt/1lg7Ci8

TIL Michelle Kunimoto discovered dozens of planets while an undergraduate and Ph.D. student at age 26. She uses publicly available data collected by NASA’s Kepler Mission and studied them in a new, more sensitive way to find signals of planets that Kepler had missed https://ift.tt/Lx9eXfK

TIL in 2007 two Americans re-discovered Pure Nacional cacao trees thought to have been completely wiped out by disease in the early 20th century. The ancient Nacional varietal was cultivated more than 5,000 years ago, and is thought to produce the world’s most exquisite (and expensive) chocolate. https://ift.tt/Rgxk2Vn

TIL Metallica's "Master of Puppets" reached both the Billboard Hot 100 (no. 40) & the UK Top 40 (no. 22) for the first time ever in July 2022 after the 1986 metal classic was prominently featured in the Season 4 finale of Stranger Things. https://ift.tt/Q3BJZTu

TIL that in 2019 a law was passed in Colorado, nicknamed the Lemonade Stand law, that allows kids under the age of 18 to operate a temporary business without a license if it operates for no more than 84 days in a calendar year. https://ift.tt/HEmNLS4