› added 5 years ago

200

TIL Lobster was a throwaway food in Colonial England.

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YYWG TIL that animals and their meat have different names (e.g. deer = venison) because the peasants that raised the animals used the animal’s Germanic name while the aristocracy that ate them used the French name.
ejRL TIL that NASA has one Hubble Telescope pointed at space. The CIA has 15 of them pointed at Earth.
pY0Zb TIL that in 1789, during an attempted execution by breaking wheel in Versailles, a sympathetic crowd stormed the scaffold, rescued the condemned man, and burned the wheel—effectively halting the execution.
9lmG TIL a man committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital 7 years ago for fabricating a story of large scale money-laundering at a major bank is to have his case reviewed after internal bank documents proving the validity of his claims have been leaked.
WkEL4 TIL about Basil Zaharoff, He sold the Greek government a submarine, then told the Turkish government that the Greeks had a submarine, Turkey then bought 2 submarines. He then told the same to the Russian government who later bought 2 submarines as well. None of the submarines worked.