› added 4 years ago

175

TIL for decades, cartographers have made secret illustrations on Switzerland’s official topographical maps such as a spider, a naked woman, and a marmot, eluding the Swiss Federal Office of Topography for years before removal. The naked woman reclined for nearly 60 yrs in the municipality of Egg.

xValg TIL of H. Beatty Chadwick, the man who holds the record for the longest time in contempt of court. After serving 14 years for refusing to disclose funds in a civil matter, Chadwick was released because the court decided that his incarceration had "lost it's coercive effect."
dGMr TIL that Canada’s new Governor General-designate is an astronaut, spent time on the ISS, speaks 6 languages, did research at the IBM lab in Zurich, played piano and sang with several orchestras, and has helped make space robots.
0dvKM TIL that every single bus in America must stop at all railroad crossings, open their door and driver's side window and turn down the radio ... all based upon ONE SINGLE crash involving a school bus and a freight train 86 years ago in Utah that left two dozen people dead.
e0Ogb TIL the gyroids in the Animal Crossing series are based on the Haniwa, terracotta clay figures that were made for ritual use and buried with the dead as funerary objects during the Kofun period (3rd to 6th centuries AD) of the history of Japan
N7mJP TIL that France built a fake Paris in WWI to confuse german bombers, which was located North of Real Paris