› added 11 years ago

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TIL An Australian public transport authority (Metro Trains, Melbourne) made a music video to promote railway safety. The video was censored in Russia because it “contains a description of different ways of committing suicide”

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Eg67X TIL: A suicide bomber was thwarted by an Afghan stray dog which barked and snarled at the man, which caused him to prematurely detonate at the entrance. The dog was then flown to the US and appeared on Oprah and was adopted. However, she was captured and euthanized by mistake at an animal shelter.
Z8evY TIL that H1N1, the influenza strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, survived another 40+ years as a seasonal flu bug. It was finally “extinguished” by another flu virus, H2N2, in the 1957 flu pandemic. Even so, a “new” H1N1 emerged 50 years later to cause the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
R7n84 TIL that the phrase piggy bank doesn’t come from the animal the jar represents, but from the old word pygg which is clay used to make crockery. If this jar cracked and couldn’t hold liquids, people would use them as their own personal banks.
ADj6w TIL in 1977 Topps inadvertently issued a Star Wars trading card in which C-3PO appeared to have an erection.
Lkp9Q TIL that In order to supply water to the parks of the Palace of Versailles, Louis XIV ordered the construction of the machine Marly to pump water from the Seine located 10 km from the castle with a drop of 150 meters. This machine, considered one of the most complex of its time worked for 133 years