› added 12 years ago

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TIL A man protested against the 1956 olympic torch relay by carrying a fake flame, consisting of a pair of underpants set on fire in a plum pudding can, attached to a chair leg. He tricked onlookers and even handed it to the Mayor of Sydney, Pat Hills before escaping without being noticed

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x6600 TIL Leon Lederman, recipient of a Nobel Prize in Physics and author of The God Particle, faced overwhelming medical debt near the end of his life and was forced to sell his Nobel Prize to pay it off
PYELn TIL that Fema sometimes measures disasters impact using a thing called the waffle house index. This is because there are so many of them and they have the unique ability to operate completely off gas for power/heat/cook. So if the waffle house is closed then its tantamount to complete disaster!
YpGJA TIL Iowa man Jerald Reiter brought his pet zebra & parrot into the Dog House bar in Dubuque, but the bartender told the trio to leave. Although his truck wasn't in motion when police found Reiter sitting in his truck with the zebra & parrot, he was charged with an OWI. A friend drove the pets home.
4Xpva TIL that the paragraph from "Cambridge University" that you can read despite the "jumbled" order of the letters isn't so jumbled, wasn't from Cambridge, the "researcher" doesn't exist, and the supposed effect doesn't really work.
BrVpk TIL, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a contest to complete the phrase "as Canadian as ____" ....... The winning entry: "As Canadian As Possible, Under the Circumstances"