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TIL when brought before McCarthy’s ‘House Committee on Un-American Activities’ communist investigation, Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, named names when asked about actors in his union who could be 'communist sympathizers’. This resulted in his first wife divorcing him.

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E14Wp TIL after the 1980 film Popeye flopped, the set was abandoned, so the locals of Mellieha, Malta reclaimed it as a Popeye theme park.
R5vA6 TIL of the plant Hydnora africana. It has no roots, leaves or chlorophyll and, apart from its flower, lives entirely underground.
x6Elk TIL Bruce Springsteen wrote a song for the Ramones after Joey Ramone asked him to. However, his manager convinced him to keep it, as songs Bruce gave to other artists kept becoming hits, while Bruce didn't have big hit singles yet. That song ended up being Hungry Heart, Bruce's first top 5 single.
VM5OG TIL Einstein’s theory of special relativity explains why a star can burn for billions of years without running out of fuel. If you can measure potential energy by multiplying mass by the speed of light squared, that means an average adult stores 30 large hydrogen bomb explosions worth of energy.
n8Ab TIL Tom Hanks intentionally gained 50 pounds to film the first half of Cast Away. He then took a year off to lose the weight and grow out his hair prior to filming the second half. During the break, the director and most of the crew went off to film What Lies Beneath.