› added 4 years ago

49

TIL that to establish jurisdiction in the Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing (Lockerbie), Camp Zeist, a former United States Air Force base in the Netherlands, was, in 2000, temporarily declared sovereign territory (Exclave) of the United Kingdom, in order to allow the trial to take place.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

MeQJ7 TIL that leader of Libertarian Party of Canada ran for the President of Poland and got 23.1% of the vote. A key element of his campaign was a black briefcase – allegedly containing "secret documents" that were going to destroy his rivals' careers and that he would present when the time was due.
yQmX8 TIL after a Polish Admiral of German descent Józef Unrug was taken prisoner during WW2, his former Imperial German Navy friends came to visit him. Unrug refused to speak German with them, saying that he had forgotten that language in September 1939 the day Germany invaded Poland
xVbdD TIL that for the 1981 movie Escape from New York, the futuristic “computer graphics” shots of three-dimensional wireframe animations was made using handmade miniature models. Real computer graphics would have been far more expensive.
xVoX0 TIL that when Diogenes, the Ancient Greek philosopher, was mocked by members of the Athenian Elite at a party, who were comparing him to a dog and throwing him bones across the room, he simply stood up, walked over, lifted his leg and took a big ol' steaming piss all over them.
BrxQL TIL that in 1874, a book titled "Shadows from the Walls of Death" was published that warned about the use of poisonous arsenic dyes in wallpaper, and the book contained specimens of the wallpaper. The book was so toxic that all but four copies have been destroyed.