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TIL Joe Strummer (frontman of The Clash) was pressured by his manager to go into hiding in France as a publicity stunt because their Scottish leg of the tour was selling slowly. Joe Strummer obliged but instead he “dicked around” in France and ran the Paris Marathon in April 1982.

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AN14w TIL Crosswalk "push to walk" buttons in cities like New York no longer control traffic lights, yet pedestrians keep pressing them because it feels like control
OA41 TIL ~900 Germans from the town of Demmin committed suicide in panic of the advancing Red Army. Mothers walked into rivers with a rock in a backpack and their babies in their arms. One man shot three young children, then their mothers, then his wife, then himself, but survived as a blind man.
j6d7X TIL that the Thoroughbred racehorse Equipoise (1928–1938), mentioned in the song "Fugue for Tinhorns" from the 1950 musical 'Guys and Dolls', was a real-life stakes winner. While "Epitaph" is fictional, the American Quarter Horse stallion and racehorse Go Man Go was a great-grandson of Equipoise.
LkgGP TIL that East Germany invested the machinery, housing, farm training, and infrastructure necessary to increase the coffee production in Vietnam, in exchange for 50% of the Vietnamese coffee harvest for 20 years. The first usable harvest occurred in 1990, one year after the Berlin Wall fell.
ZV5R TIL learned when the Soviets exhumed Tamerlane’s body in 1941, they found an inscription in his casket that said “Who ever opens my tomb, shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.” Hitler invaded the USSR two days later