› added 1 year ago

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TIL about the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world yacht race held in 1968-69. Of the 9 participants: 4 retired before leaving the Atlantic Ocean, one retired after Cape Horn, one sank, one committed suicide, one abandoned it, and only one completed the race

eokJ TIL that when the Space Shuttle Columbia landed in White Sands, New Mexico in 1982, sand got everywhere. So much gypsum dust got into the spacecraft that sand kept coming out from nooks and crannies of Columbia for the next two decades.
j6pBp TIL that when Dylan Thomas (the Welsh poet) died, his widow had his body shipped from New York to Wales. While they were under way, she discovered a group of sailors unwittingly using the coffin as a card table. She decided not to say anything as she thought her husband would have liked it.
9xXm TIL some states in India had made every crime punishable by forced sterilization in the 1970’s. Some were punished for traveling on a train without buying a ticket. In total 8.3 million vasectomies & tubal ligations had been done.
BMjW TIL that astronauts in the ISS “do their laundry” by having new clothes shipped to them in an unmanned spacecraft that then has the old clothes put into it and is burnt up upon reentry.
xV5K5 TIL Bill Murray and Harold Ramis clashed during the filming of Groundhog Day. Murray wanted the movie to be more contemplative while Ramis saw it as more of a comedy. After filming was completed the two didn't speak to each other for 21 years, only reconciling shortly before Ramis' death in 2014