› added 6 years ago

150

TIL The practice of pouring of a liquid in memory of those who have "passed on" was common in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. "Pouring one out for the homies" is a custom over 3,000 years old!

Read more vinepair.com

via reddit.com

E1xpP TIL "burking" is the death by asphyxiation caused by someone sitting on your chest and holding his hand over your mouth and nose. It is named after the Scottish serial killer William Burke, who used this method in order to leave few marks on the victims which he then sold to Anatomical Institutes.
5jnr TIL Richard Nixon possessed 3,700 hours of taped conversations while he was in the White House. Very few people have listened to more than a few hours of them. The tapes “go a long way toward showing Nixon’s underappreciated geopolitical genius and how he became the victim of his own emotionalism.”
xNrw TIL:There is a character in the X-men comics who has been on the team for years but, due to his power everyone except professor X would forget about him.
nJyP TIL At the height of WW1, a German-American miner was lynched by a hysterical anti-German mob in Illinois. The participants were all promptly acquitted by a jury, with the Washington Post stating that although the murder was bad, it was a ‘healthful and wholesome’ show of patriotism.
KdwQ TIL that in 1830, a black man named Ira Aldridge portrayed the title character in Othello and stunned critics not because his acting was excellent, but because a black man could remember “the most difficult passages” correctly