› added 5 years ago

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TIL that Peter the Great of Russia loved partying, so much so, that he started a club called The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters. It started as a group of 80-200 men, and grew to more than 1,500 men as the parties got bigger and bigger. They got in trouble for mocking the Church.

PYeog TIL if you get a zebrafish drunk, it convinces the other sober fish to follow it around.
PY0G TIL that the squiggly lines you sometimes see in your field of vision is actually the debris of a vein that used to be there when you were a fetus.
rRwwd TIL that in the 1700s, Queen Caroline of Great Britain had smallpox innoculation trialled on six prisoners in return for commuting their death sentences. When this was successful, she innoculated her own children, popularising the process.
Y7mjr TIL that we discovered the Loch Ness Monster was a hoax because of a chance deathbed confession In 1994. Marmaduke did it to get petty revenge on the Daily Mail for ridiculing him. He faked the famous photo using playdough and a toy submarine.
KOYJQ An extraordinary collection of images from Burns Archive shows the extent to which gas masks were promoted as an essential part of everyday life in the early 20th century. It had been 20 years since the end of World War I, when chlorine gas—and, later, mustard gas—had first been used. The estimates of total casualties from this form of chemical warfare are staggering: 88,000 dead and 1,200,000 injured. With war once again on the horizon, Britain and continental Europe began taking early precautions. In 1938, the British government issued 35 million “General Civilian Respirators”. Everyone from ballerinas to surgeons were encouraged to wear the masks.