› added 9 years ago

74

TIL The tough ultramarathon Barkley 100 mile race, with just 15 finishers in 29 years, starts off with the founder lighting a cigarette.

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9wNlD TIL Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis & Clark expedition, mysteriously died on Oct. 10, 1809, just three years after their mission's end. His close friends, including Thomas Jefferson, believed he committed suicide...but his family claimed he was murdered. The true cause of death is still contested.
4X5WX TIL That during the Vietnam War, the American navy laid thousands of sea mines in the waters off North Vietnam. In August of 1972 a solar storm caused 4,000 of them to spontaneously explode in just a few weeks.
Z8X8G TIL about Scheele’s Green, a popular pigment in the 1800s made with deadly arsenic. One famous death was of a flowermaker, who dusted the pigment onto fake foliage. “She vomited green waters; the whites of her eyes had turned green, and she told her doctor that ‘everything she looked at was green.’”
Z8oBD TIL the last guy to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) was Yukio Mishima in 1970. He was a japanese nationalist author, actor and director who had his own milita and tried to stage a oup d'état by taking over the armed forces heaquaters. He killed himself in the commandants office when it failed.
wDO1 TIL That Pixar granted a wish from 10-year-old Colby Curtin to see UP before she died from cancer. A Pixar employee flew to the Curtin’s house with a DVD of the finished film and screened it for her and her family. Curtin died seven hours later at 9:20 pm, shortly after seeing the film.