Post * loLOA — Curious Curator

› added 5 years ago

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TIL Maine has 4,600+ coastal islands, not to mention some inland too. Maine’s total coastline, including islands, is over 5,000 miles long - long enough to stretch from Maine to Alaska

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JYol4 TIL Paul Newman's friends loved his homemade salad dressing so much he started a company to sell it. That company, which now sells a variety of foods, gives 100% of its profits to charities. Newman never took any money and in just its first decade over 50 million dollars was given away.

Y79OA TIL Earl Hindman (Wilson from TV’s “Home Improvement”) played one of the hijackers in the original Taking of Pelham 123, also mostly in disguise the whole movie.

dD5Z7 TIL an 1854 London cholera outbreak was curbed by a man who defied the day's medical beliefs. Dr John Snow, father of modern epidemiology, traced the outbreak to a tainted water pump. The pump handle was removed, basically ending outbreak. The theory that disease spread by "bad air" soon unraveled.

J1XNv TIL: Professional mourners was an occupation that started in Ancient Egypt where people get paid to make ostentatious displays of grief at a funeral. It was mostly women as men were deemed unfit for the job. In modern times, some countries still have professional mourners you can hire for funerals.

WbEd TIL: The Guatemalan Special forces, the Kaibiles, are infamous for forcing recruits to raise a puppy, bonding with it and then killing and eating it. Recruits are also shot and forced to perform field surgery on themselves, and they also have to drink water out of recently fired artillery shells.