› added 12 years ago

220

TIL that NASA did not actually spend $12 billion on a Space Pen while the Russians used a pencil.

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via reddit.com

yDlX TIL that in 1781 a slave ship threw 133 slaves overboard to make an insurance claim for them as cargo.
WkN9N TIL Kid Rock didn't grow up in a trailer park, but on a six-acre estate with a 5,628-square-foot house and its own apple orchard.
m7gR TIL Trey Parker (Co-creator of South Park) has an autographed picture of Saddam Hussein in his office.
nWkl9 TIL about the Abode of Chaos. Artist Thierry Ehrmann bought an old scenic house in a rural town and transformed it into a replica war zone that serves as an open-air museum of radical avant-garde art. This has angered locals enough to sue him in France's supreme court.
5VWn TIL one of the earliest pioneers in parachuting was a woman named Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse, who jumped out of a perfectly good hydrogen balloon in 1799 and descended to safety 900 meters below.