› added 6 years ago

283

TIL the word "Ye" on nostalgic signs (Ye Old Tavern, etc) is supposed to be a Middle-English translation of "The". However, Ye was never actually a word- a character called a Thorn (þ) made a "TH" sound, so it would be spelled 'þe Old Tavern', reading as 'The Old Tavern.'

kJV45 TIL: Penn Badgley, star of Gossip Girl and You, voice acted in two Mario games for the Nintendo 64 (Mario Golf and Mario Tennis)
8L9K TIL that American psychologist George Stratton conducted experiments in which he either wore glasses inverting images both upside-down and left-right or a contraption that forced him to see his body from above. He found that it took only a few days for his brain to adapt to the new orientations.
ANrj7 TIL That J.K. Simmons played an anti-communist U.S. President Howard T. Ackerman in the video game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Parodying the 2008 Presidential election, he was in ads that had Ackerman as an alternative to the other candidates. He gained 43 votes as a write-in candidate.
womjo TIL that barbers in the medieval times used to perform surgery and tooth extractions in addition to cutting hair, which is why barber’s poles are red, white, and blue.
9Rap TIL that in 1963-6 a 120ft supergun fired over 200 projectiles weighing as much 180kg each as far as 180km into space from the Caribbean island of Barbados, setting an altitude record that has still not been broken - and the abandoned supergun is still in place on the island.