Post * 7LRX — Curious Curator

› added 9 years ago

452

TIL that safety concerns about “pencil lead” were actually about lead being in the yellow paint on the pencils. Graphite has always been used as the core, and there was never a “lead” pencil in this century

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8aOr8 TIL of Canned Lions, who are taken from their mothers, sold to petting zoos and then ultimately to hunting events for tourists to shoot. It’s legal in SA.

xWv0 TIL a hot dog stand in the center of the Pentagon was rumored to be the target of a Soviet missile strike during the Cold War because the Soviets reportedly thought it was the Pentagon’s most top secret meeting room, and the entire Pentagon was a large fortress built around the hot dog stand.

97GD TIL despite over 5 million square feet of floor space, the Pentagon in Washington was constructed in such a way that no point in the building is more than a 10 minute walk from any other point in the building.

R7Nv7 TIL it's very likely that military-style flails never existed. They are never described in medieval literature or chronicles. The original inventors were not weaponsmiths but illustrators. The smiths who made them from the 16th Century onward were just copying an idea rather than a thing.

kaWe TIL China’s pet markets make most of their money on ill animals. Vendors perform tabletop plastic surgery to make sickly mutts resemble more valuable breeds, then pump them full of new blood laced with painkillers and stimulants. The dogs are known as “week dogs,” because they die in seven days.