› added 2 years ago

144

TIL about the Hotel du Lac in Tunis, Tunisia constructed in the 1970s which is an example of Brutalist architecture. The hotel has a cantilevered design resulting in a top floor double the length of the ground floor and has prompted comparisons with the sand crawler vehicle of the Star Wars films.

Read more atlasobscura.com

via reddit.com

xVYB1 TIL: about France's almost revolution in may of 68, where 1/3rd of the workforce, and 22% of the total population protested preventing the government from working, and leading the president DeGaulle to flee without anyone in the knowing his location, only ending with an armed occupation of Paris
mxv4y TIL that the recorded cases of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) have these things in common: 1) the victims are chronic alcoholics; 2) they are usually elderly females 3) the body has not burned spontaneously, but some lighted substance has come into contact with it.
jnkj TIL that in the 1930s, parents used to keep their babies in cages on their windowsill in order to make sure they got enough air and sunshine in tall apartment buildings.
YpLax TIL the secular holiday Festivus was not invented for Seinfeld. It was created in the mid sixties by author Daniel O'Keefe as a way of rejecting the commercialism of Christmas with his family. His son later was a writer for Seinfeld and introduced his family's tradition.
N7daE TIL that before the coup d'état in 1953 Mohammad Mosaddegh was regarded as the leading champion of secular democracy and resistance to foreign domination in Iran’s modern history, and that the coup partly took place because Iran nationalized its oil industry.