› added 7 months ago

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TIL about Christine Granville, a WW2 spy and Polish aristocrat - Winston Churchill would declare her as his favourite spy. She talks her way into service with M16, gets captured by Germans twice but escapes, and rescues her lover from execution by firing squad.

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9yxG TIL a JFK assassination witness claimed to see an suspicious unidentified man standing in the window of the school book depository, who later fled the scene. His testimony was ignored, he was intimidated several times, and there were several attempts on his life.
x6ey5 TIL that investigative reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times bought and operated their own neighborhood bar in 1978 to expose corruption by city inspectors
vPP88 TIL Apollo-11 (Moon landing) guidance system computer had 4kb RAM and 32kb hard drive.
yQDye TIL The largest firework on record used a 62" shell, weighed 2797 pounds, was launched from a 26 ft metal pipe buried into Emerald Mountain in Colorado, and was launched with a starting velocity of at least 300mph.
X0o4Q TIL that the lead vocals in Elvin Bishop’s hit “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” were performed not by Bishop himself, but by his backup singer Mickey Thomas who later went on to form the band Starship with hits such as “We Built This City” “Sara” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”