› added 12 years ago

108

TIL in 1600 a volcano eruption in Peru killed approximately 2 million… in Russia

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NXm9M TIL that Richard Nixon’s infamous “I am not a crook” line was not made in reference to the Watergate scandal, but rather to a separate allegation that he had committed tax fraud.
wLxXP TIL Werner Herzog directed a documentary with 88 year old Mikhail Gorbachev in 2019. Herzog began the program by apologising for being a German because he assumed they wanted to kill him growing up, but Gorbachev said kindly Germans were his grandfather’s neighbours
grKj4 TIL that an inscription on Maya hieroglyphs details a battle between Dos Pilas and Tikal which reads “Nahb’aj ch’ich’ witzaj jo” or “The blood pooled, the heads piled up”. Dos Pilas a much smaller nation inflicted a shocking defeat upon the Tikal which helped consolidate their nation is Mesoamerica
X0Bpk TIL that when cars were new, hitting a pedestrian was a serious matter called a motor killing. As it happened more as there were more cars and more crashes, Car Manufacturers hired public relations spin doctors to invent the word Jaywalker to shift fault to pedestrians for getting hurt and dying.
moGx TIL The “Scotch” in Scotch Tape was originally a racist insult meaning ‘stingy.’ Early efforts at creating the product used too little adhesive, causing one frustrated worker to demand they “take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it.”