› added 7 years ago

714

TIL Saddam Hussein kept a torture chamber in the basement of the Iraqi mission on the Upper East Side of NYC across the street from Michael Bloomberg’s house. People who died there had their bodies mailed back to Iraq in diplomatic shipments.

Read more nymag.com

via ift.tt

BrKJK TIL from 1917 and 1926, 4,000 workers were told that the luminous paint (radium) used for watch dials was harmless, and were encouraged to lick their brushes to form a fine point. These “radium girls" experienced gruesome effects. Radiation could even be detected above their graves.
awlkb TIL Tim Burton's name was added to The Nightmare Before Christmas' title as a strategy to broaden marketing appeal. After a preview screening to a group of schoolchildren, Disney worried the film was too dark for kids. So, they had it released under a PG rating through distributor Touchstone Films.
0wj8M TIL That silver miners in the 1800s would discard their old work jeans in the mines. These jeans now can be sold for prices over $30,000, Levis going for the most! Many people have started hobbies going into the silver mines in hopes of finding them.
p8j5O TIL that the oldest dingo fossils in Australia are about 4,000 years old, so dingoes’ ancestors must have reached Australia by boat. Whole-genome studies consistently place dingoes between wolves and wolflike dog breeds.
d8oN7 TIL that “discotheque” means "library of phonograph records" in French; the term gradually came to refer to clubs where records were the norm, rather than a band. In the early 1960s, the word came into use in the United States, frequently shortened to “disco.”