Post * jNEKn — Curious Curator

› added 5 years ago

146

TIL: J. R. R. Tolkien used the name "Bag End" as a calque of "cul-de-sac", to poke fun at the British use of French terms.

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AD4g7 TIL When Sweden switched one day from driving on the left to driving on the right, it was feared that it'd result a huge increase in road death that year. In fact, the rate decreased, which was put down to Swedes driving extra cautiously

grOxb TIL Botanist David Douglas, namesake of the Douglas Fir, died falling into a wild bull pit trap when a wild bull fell in ontop of him.

kyNE TIL of Bill Morgan, a man who won a car in the lottery after being deemed clinically dead for over 14 minutes and in a coma for 12 days. Then, when a local news show asked to film a reenactment, he won $250,000 while the cameras rolled.

oBWjL TIL Way back in 1994 a camera was trained upon a lonely fishtank within the as yet unknown company Netscape. It transmitted live images of the fishtank to the emerging new landscape known as the World Wide Web. It was the second live camera on the web and is the oldest camera site still in existence

vPjdK TIL that the phrase "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" was only created in 2003 and was for an advertising campaign