Post * V7L0 — Curious Curator

› added 9 years ago

72

TIL that Charles Nelson Reilly, actor/comedian best known as the long time panelist on the game show Match Game, was a survivor of the 1944 Hartford circus tent fire in which 169 people died. He never sat in an audience again for the remainder of life because large crowds reminded him of the event.

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daZ7 TIL India is launching its mass electronic surveillance program in 2014. It will give 9 Indian govt. agencies—incl. the tax dept—the power to access, in real-time, phone conversations, text, emails, web search data & social media activity WITHOUT the approval of the courts or parliament.

Y7gAd TIL of UK conservative MP Stephen Milligan who died in 1994 of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Milligan’s body was found naked wearing only stockings and suspenders, with an orange in his mouth.

yQpjw TIL that Sudan has more pyramids than any other country on earth – even more than Egypt. There are at least 223 pyramids in the Sudanese cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroë. They are generally 20 to 30 metres high and steep sided.

j686a TIL a British woman was wrongly convicted of murdering her two sons (born 1996 and 1998) when they really died from SIDS. The little-understood disease caused a jury to believe she smothered them to death. After serving 4 years, she was released in 2003. She died in 2007 from alcohol abuse.

0kRM TIL there exists patents for a nuclear powered drill that heats up the tip of the drill to high enough temperatures to melt rocks and create a glass coated tunnel.