› added 4 years ago

224

TIL Mohammed Baparape Ali, the crown prince of Benin, has been living in Emmen, the Netherlands, for the past 3+ years, working as a caretaker of the local park. His family wants him to come back and be king, but he wants to stay in Emmen.

Read more youtu.be

via reddit.com

R7l07 TIL that in 1924, H. P. Lovecraft was hired to ghostwrite a story for Harry Houdini about Houdini's supposedly true escape from an Egyptian cult. Lovecraft lost the only copy on the way to his own wedding, and spent much of his honeymoon rewriting it with his wife's help.
OnlR TIL that carrots aren’t actually good for your eyes… it’s just a myth that the British government fabricated during WWII. They wanted to keep their newly developed radar system secret from the Germans and had to find some way to explain how they were suddenly shooting down a lot more planes.
8aXXG TIL in 1054, Chinese astronomers noted a bright "guest star" in Taurus that was visible in the daytime for 3 weeks, and didn't completely fade out for almost two years. The "guest star" was actually the supernova explosion that created the Crab Nebula, which is located some 6,500 light-years away.
XErb6 TIL that Léo Taxil, the journalist that "exposed" Freemasons as Satanists, admitted that it was an elaborate hoax over 12 years later. He once said, "I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor, but my readers wouldn't have it so."
WkpKY TIL the word quarantine comes from an Italian variant 'quaranta giorni', meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.