› added 10 years ago

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TIL in 1998 director Guillermo del Toro’s father was kidnapped and held for ransom for $1 million by Mexican bandits. Guillermo del Toro had recently invested most of his funds in the film Mimic. Good friend James Cameron gave del Toro the money, and his dad was released 72 days later.

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via reddit.com

5VVd8 TIL that a farmer from New Zealand named Kotahi-Manawa Bradford was accidentally turned into a character for the board game Rising Sun after his friends created a fake Wikipedia entry describing him as a mythical Japanese monster.
e0E4L TIL that Atlantic brants are medium-sized marine geese that can be seen in inshore waters along the U.S. east coast from Maine to Georgia as well as in parts of Europe. Also called brent geese or pale-bellied brants, they mainly eat eel grass, sea lettuce and seaweed in shallow tidal estuaries.
8eyPZ TIL during World War I, due to concerns the American public would reject a product with a German name, American sauerkraut (fermented cabbage) makers relabeled their product as "liberty cabbage" for the duration of the war.
nWaLY TIL JFK ordered 1200 of his favorite cuban cigars the night before he signed the cuban trade embargo
W7GaL TIL the Iraivan Temple on Kauai is the only all-granite, hand-carved Hindu temple in the West built without power tools or electricity. It is modeled after temples from ancient India. Its construction began in 1990 and completed in 2023. Less than 1% of Hawaii’s population is Hindu and on Kauai.