› added 11 years ago

83

TIL that a gay Communist American was kicked out of his party for being gay, and later kicked out of a gay rights group for being a Communist.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

5Yn6B TIL you'll be executed if you watch porn in North Korea.
VMxeQ TIL that the 1963 return of the village of Elten from the Netherlands to West Germany caused a bizarre 'smuggling' operation. Businessmen parked hundreds of trucks full of butter in the town on the night before the handover, dodging German import taxes when the border crossed the goods the next day
xv1w TIL the flavour “Blackcurrant” is largely unknown to people in The United States, due to a ban on the berry in the early 1900s.
R79R1 TIL of Seki Takakazu, a mathematician described as "Japan's Newton", who independently discovered many results attributed to his European contemporaries, some of which were rediscovered only centuries later.
BPyr TIL in the 1980s a man with severe OCD shot himself in the head in an attempt to commit suicide. Instead of killing him, the bullet destroyed the part of his brain that was responsible for his OCD, and he went on to become a straight-A college student five years later.