› added 5 months ago

23

TIL In 1911, two Oxford academics claimed they time-traveled to 18th-century Versailles and saw Marie Antoinette.

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8aEO4 TIL that red velvet cake is really just chocolate cake, where the cocoa powder, vinegar, and buttermilk mixed together creates a chemical reaction to help give the cake a deep maroon color, that is often enhanced by extra food coloring
JYRO4 TIL that Martha Stewart dated Sir Anthony Hopkins, but broke up with him after seeing The Silence of The Lambs, because she couldn't not associate him with Hannibal Lecter
WkLx9 TIL, CBC had a contest to complete the phrase "as Canadian as ____" (by analogy with "as American as apple pie"). The winner: "as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances"
0wwZR TIL before the electric telegraph, there was a system called the semaphore telegraph, where signals were communicated visually using a network of towers topped with pivoting blades and paddles that could be rearranged to indicate different symbols
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