› added 10 years ago

195

TIL that famed jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was in Paris during the Nazi occupation; despite Django being a gypsy, handicapped, a player of a banned music style, and a known friend of blacks and Jews, the nazi’s left him alone because some higher nazi officers were huge fans of his music.

01aR TIL the creator of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, based the idea of a character that would never grow up on his older brother who died the day before his 14th birthday, thus remaining a boy forever in his mother’s mind.
mxMwY TIL I learned that quarterbacks Joe Montana, Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Johnny Unitas and George Blanda all grew up in and around Pittsburgh.
0Z1M TIL Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week with hope it eventually be eliminated when black history became fundamental to American history. Instead it eventually became Black History Month, and critics include Morgan Freeman, who said “Black history is American history.”
Oo9rR Til the Great Chinese Famine had more deaths in areas at produced more food per capita. Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared showed that aggregate production was sufficient for avoiding famine and that the famine was caused by over-procurement and poor distribution by the government
d8Qn8 TIL that Linus Torvalds, the creator and principal developer of Linux, first met his wife Tove while running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students in 1993. He instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date