› added 11 years ago

70

TIL 1948 winter Olympic Game’s athletes lacked the resources to compete post WWII, to the point where the Norwegian team had to borrow skis from the American team

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gMayA Around 1 million people in Ireland—as well as 20,000 people in the United States—can speak Irish. It’s an ancient and unfamiliar-looking language in the Celtic group, making it a linguistic cousin of other ancient languages like Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Breton. To English speakers though, it’s a tough language to master. It has a relatively complex grammar that sees words inflected in an array of different contexts ignored in English. It uses a different word order from English that places the verb, rather than the subject, at the head of the clause. And it uses an alphabet traditionally comprising just 18 letters, so words are often pronounced completely differently from what an English speaker might expect.
oBXxL TIL in 1969 Johnny Carson made a lucky guess about the Oscar winners for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor, that led to firings in PriceWaterhouse since they believed someone had leaked the information.
4AQ5 TIL George Takei hires writers to contribute posts to his Facebook account
mxpZv TIL that a farmer called Almon Strowger invented automatic telephone switching because he didn't trust his local telephone operator. She was the wife of his competition and Strowger suspected that she was diverting requests for his services to her husband’s business instead.
pY9Np TIL: There is a shipwreck in a cave not far from New Zealand that contains close to 5 Million USD of gold.