› added 11 years ago

102

TIL 60 years ago the Rose Parade was the first national color broadcast. The quality was so poor you had look at B&W sets to see the details of the floats & back to the color sets to see the colors.

R7JjQ TIL twins Grace and Virginia Kennedy (b. 1970) were often left alone with their German speaking grandmother as children and as a result developed their own secret language. They used it til they were about 8 when they were forbidden to by their father. They called each other "Poto" and "Cabengo".
N19M TIL that Puyi, the last Emperor of China, spent his last years as a commoner in Beijing under the communist regime. On his first day of work as a street sweeper, he was lost and told passersby, “I’m Puyi, the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty. I’m staying with relatives and can’t find my way home.”
xXG7 TIL that in the 1700s, the Russian Empire had a black African major-general, governor and nobleman, who had come from Africa as a gift for Peter the Great, and who was also the great-grandfather of Russian author Pushkin.
Eg4Qw TIL: The term "Tory" comes from the Middle Irish word "tóraí," which means "outlaw" or "robber." The name "Tory" was originally intended to be an insult, but it was eventually embraced by the party and its members.
gM6bL TIL that flies avoid getting swatted the same way Keanu Reaves dodges bullets in The Matrix: by watching time pass slowly. "Animals smaller than us see the world in slo-mo. It seems to be almost a fact of life."