› added 2 months ago

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TIL in 456 BCE Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, was killed after an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. According to Pliny, Aeschylus had been avoiding a prophecy which foretold that one day a house would fall on him and take his life.

0dbVL TIL that in 2024 a construction company built an entire family home on the wrong lot in Hawaii after miscounting the number of telephone poles on the land. They then sold the home without the landowner knowing.
16klV TIL that "U and non-U English" was a British theory of dialects in the 1950s that noted that the aspiring middle classes actually used "more refined" language than the upper classes - like "pardon?" instead of "what?", and to "pass on" instead of to "die"
wMvW TIL that there is a super exclusive secret private club in Disneyland, California which is the only place inside the park that serves alcohol (during normal park operating hrs)! And it has 10+ years of waiting list for membership
KgX4 TIL: In 1930, Babe Ruth signed a contract for a record breaking $80,000. He was asked by a reporter what he thought of his yearly salary being more than President Hoover’s $75,000. His response: “I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.”
ADLAl High-speed video imaging colored to reveal the two main components of a sneeze show a shower of larger droplets, green, whose trajectories can extend up to two meters from the person sneezing, yellow, and a cloud, red, made of a mixture of smaller droplets suspended in moist, warm gas. Pathogen-bearing droplets can be suspended in the air for not just seconds, but minutes, and can travel up to 27 feet.