› added 4 years ago

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TIL that director William Friedkin first approached Audrey Hepburn for the role of Chris MacNeil in "The Exorcist" but she was only willing to take the role if it was shot in Rome, as she had recently moved to Italy. Also considered, ahead of Ellen Burstyn, were Anne Bancroft and Jane Fonda.

YpweB TIL about Freddie and Truus Oversteegan, teenage sisters who lured, ambushed and killed German Nazis from their bicycles—and never revealed how many they had assassinated.
PyMO TIL that on the set of the Wizard of Oz, the actors playing the Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard resented being “upstaged” by a woman and refused to even talk to Judy Garland between takes. The only friend Garland made on set was Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch.
YgmG TIL A British bomb detection dog in Afghanistan died from the stress of seeing his handler shot. They had set a new record for bomb detections and the dog was awarded the equivalent to a Victoria Cross.
VML9Q TIL Dennis Richie, who along with Ken Thompson, created the C programming language in the 60s, the most influential language in history, as well as Unix (THE operating system behind MacOS and Linux), died a week after Steve Jobs in 2011. His death was ignored due to media coverage of Jobs' death.
5YlnD TIL: In 1209, a student of Oxford University apparently killed a woman and fled. In retaliation, the townspeople hanged three students. The school suspended operations and the faculty all feared the mob. Many of the facility then moved to Cambridge and founded a new university there.