› added 7 years ago

1602

TIL that the bumper to bumper traffic in much of New York is a legacy of one racist man who used billions of public infrastructure dollars to build ill-conceived highways in order to segregate and disenfranchise neighborhoods, while evicting over 250,000 of the city’s poor.

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lonW1 TIL in 1976, a mule named Lord Fauntleroy beat 200 horses in the 3,500-mile Great American Horse Race. Along the way, Norton, the mule’s rider, would often stop to help other riders, beat everyone by 10 hours, and retired with the $25,000 prize while calling himself the “Great American Horseman.”
e0V5k TIL that there was a rumor that Stephen Hawking would deliberately run over the toes of people he didn’t like. He denied this rumor by stating it was “A Malicious rumor” and “I’ll run over anyone who repeats it”.
nkZP TIL the US House of Representatives was banned from editing Wikipedia after staff were caught making “persistent disruptive edits”, including naming former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an alien wizard who eats Mexican babies.
7rQOX TIL when Alexander the Great conquered Persia from Darius III he stole his mother. After kidnapping her, she become to devoted to Alexander, while he referred to her as “mother,” and when called on to mourn Darius III she said “I have only one son [Alexander] and he is king of all Persia.”
4bG5 TIL in 2010, the floor of a Weight Watchers clinic in Sweden collapsed beneath a group of 20 members who were in line for their weekly weigh in. The floor collapsed in one corner of the room, fault lines spread, & other sections of the floor gave way. Nobody was hurt.