› added 7 years ago

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TIL In Japan, houses are considered depreciating assets. Half of all homes are destroyed by the time they are 38 and rebuilt. There are 4 times as many architects and twice as many construction workers per capita as the US. There is no home equity LOC and virtually no home improvement industry.

8yB4 TIL that the SNL Jeopardy sketch was created by Norm Macdonald purely so that he could show off his Burt Reynolds impression.
neB5W TIL that Nazis ordered the Minsk Ghetto to turn over a Jewish resistance leader, Hersh Smolar, hiding in a hospital. They handed over a bloody passport and said he'd been killed in a roundup shooting. The Nazis fell for it. Smolar survived the war.
1nO8 TIL a man named Vincent Ocasla has created a fully functional “flawless” Sim City 3000 game spanning 1.5 years of theory and planning, followed by 2.5 years of construction. He is considered to have “beaten” the game.
VMnw4 TIL: The term Blitzkrieg was mostly adopted by western journalists and never used by the Wehrmacht as an official military term. Hitler called it 'A completely idiotic word' and some senior officers even disputed the idea that it was a military concept.
mN7Y TIL in 1996, as a April Fool’s Day prank, the Taco Bell Corporation took out a full-page ad that appeared in six major newspapers saying that it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. The National Historic Park in Philadelphia received hundreds of outraged calls.