› added 13 years ago

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TIL that the character of Nigel Thornberry is strongly influenced by David Attenborough

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YpxlG TIL that in Iceland, if you want to make your own necropants (nábrók), you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his death, flay his lower body after he's buried, then steal a coin from a poor widow and place it in the scrotum. The coin will draw money into the scrotum.
D1ZKr TIL of Wei Jie. A frail youth who lived in 3rd Century AD China, he was considered to be so beautiful that hordes of admirers mobbed him/his home all day, which caused him to die of stress. "Wei Jie died of stares" is now a Chinese idiom describing celebrities who have very obsessive fandoms.
xVOyg TIL About the diving horses of Atlantic City. From the mid 1880's until 1978! the (mostly female) riders would ride their horse up a ramp some 60 ft high to plummet into a small pool.
1aYoW TIL that although being dwarfed by Nazi Germany, Belgium had one of the largest armies per capita in the world with 1 in 5 Belgian men being on active duty when Germany invaded.
wepP TIL that up to 45 million Chinese were killed in the Chinese government’s “Great Leap Forward”. Punishment for stealing a potato would be death by drowning, and parents were forced to bury their children alive or be drowned in urine. This makes the Great Leap Forward the largest 20th century murder.