› added 5 years ago

220

TIL: The Statue That Offended New York was a nickname for a realistic nude sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that circa 1900 stood on the city's highest point. A critic said the nearby park's character changed: kids displaced by "club men...with field glasses.” (The art was later sent to a museum.)

j9RM TIL the marble masterpiece “Sleeping Hermaphroditus” was unearthed ~1608 after being buried for centuries. In 1620, 22-yr-old phenom Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved the marble mattress on which s/he lies today that’s so strikingly realistic visitors are compelled to give it a testing prod.
WKoA TIL That Nordic folklore has a Christmas character called “Perchta the Disemboweller”, who would either give you coins for being good or would slit your belly open and fill it with oats and straw if you had been bad.
p8w4G TIL pieces of Skylab were scattered around a part of Western Australia after its reentry into Earth. As a joke, the local government then fined NASA $400 for littering. It went unpaid for 30 years until a Californian DJ raised funds to pay the fine.
l8Nr TIL that an increase in how much your older cat meows can be a sign of Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome (CDS), a disorder similar to dementia in humans.
woeLY TIL US government is putting together a team to disclose existence of "non-human intelligence" to the public. The team will include 1 current or former foreign service official, 1 scientist or engineer, 1 economist, 1 professional historian and 1 sociologist.