› added 2 months ago

9

TIL Deep Purple's song 'Smoke on the Water' was based on a true story of the band recording in Switzerland

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XWWr TIL that Monty Python inspired not only the word “spam”, but also the names of 7 asteroids, a programming language, a species of lemur, and a mutant gene in flies.
OorZ6 TIL the last known living survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Matilda McCrear, was abducted from Nigeria at the age of two and died in Selma, Alabama in 1940
ANK57 TIL that King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia is the only ruling monarch in the world to be fluent in Czech.
VM0yG TIL, The unsinkable HMS Titanic was on fire before it left port. The iceberg it struck whilst at sea was only part of the reason it sank, as the fire had already weakened the ships structural integrity.
rLVw TIL that the “Red Zone” in France, where some of the most intense combat from WW1 took place, is utterly uninhabitable. Countless undetonated chemical weapons and explosives riddle the earth which, along with the tons of human remains, have rendered the soil and water highly toxic.