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SITE OF THE DAY: The Martin Luther Insult Generator, ergofabulous.org/luther/
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The custom of relaying the Olympic torch has no ancient precedent: it was invented as a stunt for the Berlin Games in 1936.
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Pierre de Courbertin's original plan was to add a new Olympic ring for each completed Olympiad. If he’d had his way, the Olympic symbol would now feature 28 rings.
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Dogs will ignore their owners if they know they are lying.
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If all the Birds Eye waffles sold in a year were stacked up, they would be 474 times higher than Mount Everest.
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Word of the Day: CLINCHPOOP — someone lacking in ‘gentlemanly breeding’, a boor.
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Charles Dickens wrote to a friend that his annoying house guest Hans Christian Andersen ‘speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.’
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
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‘Jus de chaussette’ is a French phrase for disgusting coffee that literally means ‘sock juice’.
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Many of the doves released at the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening ceremony were accidentally roasted alive when the Olympic flame was lit.
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After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lithuania could not afford to send its basketball team to the 1992 Olympics.
The Grateful Dead offered to sponsor the team if they played in tie-dyed uniforms. They wore these shirts on the podium when taking home bronze.
🖼️: Greg Speirs.
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At the 1936 Summer Olympics, Japanese pole vaulters Sueo Oe and Shuhei Nishida tied.
Rather than accepting a tie break, the two cut their medals in half and spliced them together to make a "friendship medal".
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"If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there." MARK TWAIN
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The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has specifically ruled that Jeff Bezos is not an astronaut.
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The ideal time to make a joke about something horrible is 36 days later.
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Hoping for more Olympic drama? The 1924 Olympic fencing competition featured two real duels over scoring disputes.
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For Christmas 1936, Salvador Dalí sent Harpo Marx a harp with barbed-wire strings. Harpo sent back a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.
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People spend 46.9% of the day daydreaming.
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Silver medalists, take heart: on average, athletes that win silver medals at the Olympics live longer than their gold medal-winning counterparts.
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Word of the Day: FIMBLE-FAMBLE — a weak excuse.
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The winner of the first modern Olympic Marathon stopped at a tavern mid-race for a glass of wine.
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Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? - HENRY WARD BEECHER
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WEBSITE OF THE DAY: This one lets you calculate journey times and costs of travel in the Roman Empire orbis.stanford.edu (h/t @jessicamdalt)
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In 1802, US businessman Timothy Dexter wrote a book, ‘A Pickle for the Knowing Ones’, containing no punctuation marks. When readers complained, he released a second edition with 11 lines of punctuation at the end for readers to distribute as they saw fit.
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The 1900 Paris Olympics featured an underwater swimming event in the Seine: The contestants got a point for every second spent underwater and two points for every metre they swam underwater. The event was discontinued due to ‘the lack of spectator appeal’.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves