› added 13 years ago

158

TIL that Comedy Central only agreed to air the word “shit” uncensored in the South Park episode “It Hits the Fan” (the first South Park to do so) if the word was used an absurdly high number of times. The episode had 200 total shits- 162 spoken, 38 written.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

b61d7 TIL Frederick Forsyth spent six months reporting on the Nigerian Civil War for BBC. He asked to continue covering the war, and BBC refused. So Forsyth quit and covered the war freelance for two years, during which time he claims to have been an MI6 informant.
9w49B TIL about the Zuma, a classified program run by the National Reconnaisance Office. At $3.5 billion, it was at the time the most expensive space launch ever conducted. The satellite apparently failed during deployment and fell back to earth
1awNd TIL of Eric Hoffer, a writer and philosopher, who went blind from age 7 to 15. He was so afraid he would go blind again that he spent his life reading, studying and writing everything he could before he lost his sight again (which he never did).
xVdN1 TIL that there is a gene that leads to near-sightedness when children begin reading at a young age. Over 44 percent of adults in the US are now nearsighted, up from 25 percent in the 1980s.
Ba5r TIL in 1992, a Lawyer and a Judge were looking for files on a former prisoner in a police station near Paraguay. Instead, they stumbled upon archives documenting an international conspiracy involving the torture, murder, and imprisonment of 480,000 people, now known as the Archives of Terror.