› added 6 years ago

462

TIL: Gin drinkers of London used to call "Puss", wait for a meow reply, then hold their glasses underneath a wooden cat to illegally obtain their drink.

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b9OPp TIL "Roses are red/Violets are blue" dates back to 1590 with the lines: "In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew//She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;// She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,// And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew."
6xbQ TIL a drunk Richard Nixon ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea for shooting down a spy plane. Henry Kissinger intervened and made him sober up before deciding.
D1epv TIL : we finally developed a new steel alloy as light as titanium!
571p TIL On September 1918, a wounded German soldier limped into Private Tandey’s line of fire. “I took aim but couldn’t shoot a wounded man,” said Tandey, “so I let him go.” Years later he discovered he had spared an Austrian Corporal named Adolf Hitler.
bXZN TIL that bonfires were fires originally used to burn bones, which is actually where their names derive from.