› added 5 years ago

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TIL Joseph Kennedy threatened to sue ABC for revealing that his son John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer-prize winning book Profiles in Courage was ghost-written. They retracted the story. The book wasn't considered for the prize until Joe convinced a boardmember to persuade others to vote for it.

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5BnD TIL in 1864, George Boole a Mathematician and Logician, walked two miles in the drenching rain and lectured wearing his wet clothes. He became ill, developing a severe cold and high fever.His wife believed that remedies should resemble their cause, so she poured water on him, he died that year at 49
awlg0 TIL of the Catherine Wheel- A torture device used widely from the Middle Ages until 1841. A victim was tied down and had each limb broken by a cart wheel, and then the limbs were braided between the spokes and the person left to die. One man lasted 9 days before passing.
R7GG9 TIL that for the 2015 Chinese film "Wolf Totem", 35 Mongolian wolves were trained in China for over 4 years by a Scottish trainer, who trained them to sit, snarl, and fight on cue. After filming, the wolves were ultimately relocated to Canada, since they only understood commands in English
YKp7 TIL The hit song “House of the Rising Sun”, covered by The Animals, Bob Dylan, and others, was written in London in the 1700’s, and historians have no idea as to its origin, or who wrote it.
BgB1r TIL the first mention of a double-nosed dog in the Amazon jungle was in 1913 by Percy Fawcet after an expedition there. But no one believed him & the dog remained a cryptozoological beast until the 2000s when John Blashford-Snell returned with photo evidence of the Double-Nosed Andean Tiger Hound.