› added 9 years ago

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TIL in 2006 a judge in Texas sentenced a 14-year-old black girl who was a first time offender to prison for 7 years for shoving a hall monitor, 3 months earlier that same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl,convicted of arson for burning down her family’s house, to probation.

06bM TIL in 2007 CBS released a CSI toy which included a fingerprint dusting powder that contained up to 5% asbestos. Finally, 20 months after an asbestos victims’ organization made this fact public a recall was carried out.
k87E TIL in WWII,Germans tank drivers in Africa would drive tanks over camel poop for luck. Allies responded by planting land mines disguised as camel dung. Germans got wind of this and began riding over dung that was already overrun with tank tracks. In turn, Allies made mines looking like overrun dung
nWa5G TIL about the ghost ship Sachem, which started as a world class yacht in NYC, became a warship in WW1, transported Thomas Edison for wartime experiments, and eventually became a pleasure ship again before becoming stuck in a small creek in Kentucky where it sits today.
78PoZ TIL that the longest word entered in most standard English dictionaries is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is 45 letters long and describes a type of lung disease. The longest "word" stands at 189,819 letters long and would not fit in the title of this thread.
nWWL9 TIL in 2008, Johnny Depp told Beavis & Butt-head creator Mike Judge he was interested in playing Beavis for a live-action film. Depp and Marlon Brando would riff on the B&B characters while filming Don Juan DeMarco. Judge said he considered the idea of a live-action B&B, but nothing came of it.