› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Dipprasad Pun, a Nepalese soldier during the War of Afghanistan who was attacked by 30 insurgents. Believing he was about to die, he expended all 400 rounds of his ammunition, launched 17 grenades, detonated a Claymore mine, and killed an attacker with his tripod, causing them to retreat.

6XBm TIL that the Canadian Football League has existed since 1909, and for the first three a university team beat three professionals to get the championship.
Wk1G4 TIL the Coens Brothers, Glenn Ficarra, and Terry Zwigoff first pitched "Bad Santa" to Universal Studios, which rejected it on the grounds that "[i]t was the most foul, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine." Miramax instead financed and distributed the movie.
9wL8p TIL that the first recorded Ponzi scheme wasn’t by Charles Ponzi: it was by German Adele Spitzeder in the 19th century, who used new investors’ money to repay old investors. At her height, she was the wealthiest woman in Bavaria, until she was convicted of bad accounting and stripped of her assets
DQm1j TIL that in 1841, Richard Beard opened England's first professional photography studio, pioneering the commercialization of photography by securing exclusive rights to the daguerreotype process in England and Wales
16M1P TIL The hand heart gesture was first noted in art in 1989, when Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan created an art image of the gesture as his first artwork named Family Syntax. Hand hearts became popular in 2010s