› added 10 years ago

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TIL In 1954 a fifteen year old told his parents he was going to school, but then rode his bike 700 miles in a week from D.C. to Atlanta because he was “homesick for Dixie and his grandmother’s fried chicken”.

p75N TIL in 2004, an activist from The Yes Men falsely claiming to represent Dow Chemicals was interviewed by BBC, claiming Dow had agreed to a $12 billion settlement for victims of the 1984 Bhopal, India chemical disaster (in which 3,000 peopl died). Dow lost $2 billion in the ensuing stock selloff.
wL7nY TIL: There are pyramids in Mauritius. The builders have not been identified and many people write off as "just piles of rocks" despite them having an uncanny resemblance to many other pyramids in Tenerife and Sicily 1000s of miles away
N7BYQ TIL There is a monument in Kyoto Japan called the Ear Mound. It consists of Ears and Noses of Chinese and Koreans killed by the Japanese in the late 1500's. Its estimated there are 38,000 Korean noses in this Ear Mound memorial.
69YRZ TIL at the beginning of WWII some 2,500 generals served in the German armed forces. Many would wear their brightly colored and highly identifiable uniforms and vehicle insignia. This increased “personal battlefield lethality” and was a significant factor in debilitating the German war machine.
6E1LX TIL about Chris Lee Burden, an American performance artist most well known for his work Shoot (1971), in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm using a small-caliber rifle.