› added 1 year ago

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TIL embalming was popularized in the United States by the need to transport the bodies of Civil War soldiers home for burial and especially by the display and transport of Abraham Lincoln's body after his assassination.

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yQrjp TIL during filming of the 90s cop show "Homicide: Life on the Street," a shoplifting suspect surrendered to actors portraying detectives as they rehearsed a scene.
LkLKp TIL that there is a church in scotland which has a gargoyle in the shape of a Xenomorph from the Alien movies
VM4V0 TIL that the city of Nice (France) has been firing a cannon shot everyday at noon since 1861, a tradition set by Scottish officer Thomas Coventry More who used the cannon shot to warn his wife he was coming for lunch.
LkVoQ TIL that between the 11th and 19th centuries, Buddhist monks in northern Japan practiced a kind of meditation called Sokushinbutsu, in which they would mummify themselves alive by slowly weaning themselves off food and water before eventually starving to death
5OOk TIL - An apparently mentally ill Roman Catholic priest has regularly interrupted sporting events by running onto the track with signs about the impending apocalypse. He may have cost a Brazilian runner his Olympic Gold Medal. He was finally defrocked in 2005.