Postagens

Mostrando postagens de janeiro, 2021

TIL that fishballs were invented when China's first emperor demanded fish with every meal. He threatened to execute the chef if he found bones in his food. The chef mashed the fish to remove bones quicker, ran out of time, panicked, so he squeezed the fish paste into balls and threw it in some soup.

TIL there's a hobby called magnet fishing where people use rare earth magnets attached to ropes and throw them into rivers and other bodies of water to pull up metal objects and they often find weapons

TIL the most powerful volcanic eruption in the last 7,000 years, on the Indonesian island of Lombok, led to a global mini-ice age that contributed to the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings

TIL the motel where MLK was assassinated is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

TIL Hershey's Chocolate in the US tastes distinctly like vomit for foreigners used to Swiss and Belgian chocolate due to the use of butyric acid, which is used to prolong the shelf-life of Hershey's.

TIL That women also competed as gladiators in ancient Rome and there is a marble relief dating to around the 2nd century A.D. depicting a bout between two women dubbed “Amazon” and “Achillia,” whom the inscription says fought to an honorable draw.

TIL a bird that went extinct re-evolved itself back to existence

TIL: Leif Erikson was a Norse explorer from Iceland. He is thought to have been the first known European to have set foot on continental North America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus.

TIL that the first Polish encyclopaedia included such definitions as "Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is", and "Dragon: Dragon is hard to overcome, yet one shall try."

TIL That Spaceballs was originally going to be titled Planet Moron, but was changed when a film titled Morons from Outer Space was released; Spaceballs, despite the assumed innuendo, was a result of needing “space” in the title and Brooks considering it one of his trademark “screwball” comedies.

TIL The Beatles were all still in their 20s when they broke up. George Harrison was 26, Paul McCartney was 27, John Lennon was 28, and Ringo Starr was 29.

TIL when Prohibition was enacted in USA, it took less than an hour for the first documented violation of it to happen

TIL that the closest living relative of all whales is the hippopotamus. Whales evolved from a terrestrial(land) animal, this is the reason whales can't breathe under water like fishes and need to come up for air. They literally evolved backwards, but in the process have the become the largest mammal

TIL the song "Hotel California" by The Eagles has no real meaning. The band wanted to create "sort of like an episode of the Twilight Zone", and ""We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it".

TIL pole dancing became more common during the Great Depression since traveling performers would dance in tents at this time. Eventually, these performers began to incorporate the tent pole into their striptease routines.

TIL the Great grey owl is so elusive, it was first "discovered" by Europeans exploring Canada, despite the fact that the species exists in Europe.

TIL about the practice of widow's succession. This was a practice used by several countries in the early 20th century were if a politician died in office they would be succeeded by their widow. The practice resulted in some of the earliest women to hold political office in modern times.

TIL that in an effort to avoid raising the nominal price of 5 cents, Coca-Cola had vending machines that would not dispense a coke one out of nine times a nickel was put in.

TIL that the full Moon always rises near sunset, the first quarter Moon near noon, the new Moon near sunrise, and the last quarter Moon near midnight.

TIL in 1763 the Paxton Boys massacred two villages of Susquehannock Indians. The militia proceeded to march on Philadelphia with the intention of killing every Indian in Pennsylvania. They were met by Benjamin Franklin who helped prevent further slaughter of the peaceful Native Americans

TIL of the California Genocide, an oft-forgotten event in U.S. history due to occurring at the same time at the California Gold Rush. The Native American population of California decreased from as many as 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1870. Tribes such as the Yahi were hunted to extinction.

TIL a woman in a wheelchair won a treadmill on the Price is Right. When someone tweeted "I laughed but then felt bad", she replied "Don't feel bad. I feel great. I've been popping wheelies all day."

TIL When the # and * keys were first put on phones they had no purpose whatsoever and were only included because touch tone phones could create up to twelve tones.

TIL that Elvis Presley suffered from hereditary bowel paralysis and would often soil himself onstage. He also had megacolon and, at his autopsy, was discovered to have been constipated with four months' worth of impacted, clay-like fecal matter.

TIL Wolverine dads often visit their young until they reach 10 weeks of age. Sometimes when the young reach 6 months of age, they may reconnect with their fathers and travel together for a time.

TIL People in the US got free flights by buying money from the government. People would buy 1$ coins in bulk from the US mint (free shipping) and pay off their credit card bill with the coins. They would buy the coins with credit cards that awarded frequent flyer miles, thus getting them free miles.

TIL Robinhood was charged by SEC with misleading retail customers on revenue sources and failing to satisfy best trade execution (not finding customers best price for their trade)

TIL that Domestic Cats are considered the most dangerous invasive species globally. The extinction of 63 different species of birds/mammals/reptiles can be directly attributed to them.

TIL that Paul McCartney refused to let Weird Al Yankovic record a parody of "Live and Let Die" entitled "Chicken Pot Pie." Yankovic said it was because McCartney was "a strict vegetarian and he didn't want a parody that condoned the consumption of animal flesh."

TIL Weird Al Yankovic had asked permission from Prince to parody his songs on numerous occasions, and has always been refused. When the two were assigned to sit in the same row at an award's show, he got a telegram from Prince's lawyers demanding he not make eye contact

TIL that since 1868 over 200 anti-lynching bills have been introduced to the US Congress. None of them have passed both houses.

TIL in 2018 an Oregon man stole a car in front of deputies and led them on a 40-mile chase. When he got arrested, he explained that he had taken LSD and thought he was living a real-life version of Grand Theft Auto.

TIL George Foreman has earned substantially more from the George Foreman Grill than he ever did from his boxing career. At the peak of sales he earned $4.5 million a month in payouts. In 1999, he was paid $138 million for the full rights to use his name.

TIL that instead of donating money to Food Bank for New York City, the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, Toyota offered to improve the efficiency of the food bank. Toyota engineers helped reduce the wait time for dinner from 90 minutes to 18, by revolutionizing the way the Food Bank operated.

TIL That children from Roosevelt's family would crawl through the space between ceilings and floors in the White House, where no living being but rats and ferrets had been for years.

TIL when Jerry Lewis taught film directing at USC in the late ‘60s, George Lucas was one of his students and Steven Spielberg audited some of his classes. Lewis later screened Spielberg's short film Amblin' (1968) and told his students, "That's what filmmaking is all about."

TIL Babylonians were using a rudimentary form of calculus to calculate Jupiter’s displacement each day along the ecliptic, the path that the sun appears to trace through the stars. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.

TIL of Rhea Clyman, a Jewish Canadian Journalist who travelled to the Soviet Union and made reports on the Siberian labor camps and the Holodomor. This led to her deportation in 1933 after which she reported on Nazi Germany until 1938 when she was forced to flee due to growing anti Semitism.

TIL N.Rothschild had early info that Napoleon lost at Waterloo, and used that info at the London stock exchange: instead of buying, he sold shares en masse, making people think that Napoleon had won and plummeting the stocks. At the last minute he started buying at low prices, thus making a fortune

TIL not only do bats make high-pitched sounds for echolocation, many bat species also sing. A team of scientists that analyzed one species’ song translated it as a sequence that opens with a hello, then a gender identification, then some geographic information, & then a "let's talk" section.

TIL all US military rations come with a packet of Tabasco sauce, which was introduced by CEO Walter Mcilhenny, a former general in the military during WWII

TIL That there was a Lego MMO that was cancelled because inappropriate players kept creating penis' and despite the team's best efforts, their software was unable to keep up with the detection of them.

TIL the state of Arizona has a "stupid motorist law"; it allows the state to fine any motorists for their rescue in the event that they drive around barricades and get stuck in flooded motorways in the process

TIL only 128 people in the United States are licensed to fly blimps

TIL Great Olympic Friendships, the friends who wouldn’t be divided by their medals. Japanese pole vaulters who tied for second place refused to compete for tie-breakers. They cut their medals in half and joined them to be half-silver, half-bronze medal

TIL Paula Abdul constantly talks about surviving a plane crash of which no record exist.

TIL Muhammad Ali was named after Cassius Marcellus Clay, an ardent abolitionist who emancipated the 40 slaves he inherited from his father. Clay edited an anti-slavery newspaper, commanded troops in the Mexican-American War and served as minister to Russia under Abraham Lincoln.

TIL after the murder of his father, Genghis Khan went into poverty, even being enslaved at one point. It wasn’t until he was in his 50’s did he rise to power and become the Khan of Mongolia

TIL that it is illegal to trade onion futures in the United States due to the 1958 Onion Futures Act, after two traders in 1955 purchased 98% of the onions in Chicago and subsequently crashed onion prices while holding short positions on onion futures.

TIL that Sudan has more pyramids than any other country on earth – even more than Egypt. There are at least 223 pyramids in the Sudanese cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroë. They are generally 20 to 30 metres high and steep sided.