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In 1931, a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
A few days later, the baseball commissioner voided her contract and declared baseball "too strenuous" for women.
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The man who invented the modern roundabout, the stop sign, the taxi stand, the one-way street, and the pedestrian crosswalk never learned how to drive.
(Image: honorary driving licence of William Phelps Eno.)
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"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." JORGE LUIS BORGES
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In the thirteenth century, Cistercian monks developed a numeral system that allowed them to write any number between 1 and 9999 with a single glyph.
(Images: Meteoorkip and Chunes33; CC BY-SA.)
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I love telling people spoilers about The Picture of Dorian Gray. Never gets old. ALEX JOHNSON
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According to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, both ‘skite’ in ‘blatherskite’ (chatterer) and ‘skate’ in ‘cheapskate’ (miser) ultimately come from the Old Icelandic verb ‘skíta’, ‘to shit’. So, a blatherskite is a blathering piece of shit and a cheapskate is a cheap piece of shit.
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Word of the Day: RUMPTYDOOLER (New Zealand slang) — someone or something excellent.
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Three-quarters of the world’s border walls and fences were installed after 2000.
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From 1559 to 1779, this fountain in Treviso, Italy was filled with free wine during festivals.
One breast provided white wine and the other provided red wine.
(Image: Didier Descouens; CC BY-SA.)
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"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk: That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." ERNEST HEMINGWAY
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Stressed men prefer big butts.
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MELIORISM is the belief that the world can be made better through concerted human effort.
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‘Irn-Bru’ has its own tartan.
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One of the nicknames given to the yellow-rumped warbler is ‘butterbutt’.
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Death rate drop during economic downturns.
People drive less and get into fewer accidents, leading to cleaner air. People also have less money to spend on cigarettes and alcohol.
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A collective noun for a group of ghostwriters is ‘a fright’.
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The Disney film ‘Bambi’ is based on Felix Salten’s novel written in 1923. In the 1930s, it was banned by the Nazis as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe, and many copies of the novel were burned.
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Replacing all the UK’s cars and vans with electric batteries would require twice the current worldwide annual production of cobalt.
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Word of the day: DOYCHLE (19th century Scots) - to work even though you're half asleep
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Noah Webster popularized many American spellings, such as "center", "color" and "defense".
Not all of his respellings were successful, though. He also suggested "soop" (soup), "iland" (island), and "iz" (is).
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There is a cafe for writers in Tokyo that won't let you leave until you've met your writing goals.
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There's a reason you always have room for dessert - your stomach expands in contact with sugar.
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Floppy disks are still used in aviation, medicine, but most of all in embroidery machines.
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Books about achieving success are usually written by people whose main success in life is selling a book about achieving success. VIKTOR PELEVIN
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In Microsoft’s internal documentation, the digital Office assistant Clippy was referred to as ‘tfc’. To anyone who asked, it was ‘the friendly character’, but it actually stood for ‘the fucking clown’.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves