› added 10 years ago

97

TIL: Only 18,741 people (0.17%) of the 11 million that filled out a bracket for the billion dollar bracket challenge are still in the running after yesterday’s upsets.

Read more ibtimes.com

via reddit.com

EOK7 TIL that the great tradition of throwing panties at rock stars did not begin with Elvis, but with Franz Liszt
X0wy8 TIL at the decisive Battle of Grandson in 1476, the entire Castle Grandson garrison surrendered only to be summarily hung from a rope and dragged through the lake until they drowned. They were executed just before Swiss reinforcements arrived.
kOJMd TIL during the exceptionally cold winter of 1795, a French Hussar regiment captured the Dutch fleet on the frozen Zuiderzee, a bay to the northwest of the Netherlands. The French seized 14 warships and 850 guns. This is one of the only times in recorded history where calvary has captured a fleet.
OGLKg TIL for decades, Marian Breland Bailey and her husband(s) trained animals to do tricks for fun and profit—piano-playing ducks, tic-tac-toe-playing chickens, dolphins for the Navy, cats for the CIA—and ended up pioneering a more humane approach to animal training.
XErEr TIL that the effects of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 were so widespread that sheep in Wales had to be put under control measures, which included measuring their radioactivity before sales. This control was finally lifted in 2012, 26 years after the disaster.