› added 2 years ago

83

TIL that Friedrich Engels had a famously strong libido. He had numerous affairs and, despite his condemnation of prostitution as "exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie", also paid for sex. In 1846, he wrote to Marx that "if there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living".

OGyre TIL A Short Film About Killing (1988) by Krzysztof Kieslowski shocked the Polish authorities and put them under pressure so much that they put a 5-year moratorium on capital punishment
6EbYW TIL that Oviraptor, which is latin for egg taker, is a misnomer. The first discovered specimen was next to what were thought to be protoceratops eggs, so it was presumed to be an egg eater. It later turned out that those were Oviraptor eggs, meaning it was brooding them, not eating them.
J1B04 TIL about the Namamugi Incident, a 1862 diplomatic crisis that occurred when a British merchant refused to dismount for a Japanese daimyō's procession and was killed by his bodyguards, sparking the brief Anglo-Satsuma War.
4kNob TIL about government-caused deaths of over 10000 people during the prohibition era because the govt decided to taint industrial alcohol to dissuade bootleggers from using this cheaper and accessible option to produce illicit liquor - with intent to scare general public away from consuming alcohol
54Vn TIL The letter R is one of the last sounds to be developed in English possibly because children aren’t always certain what people are doing to produce the sound