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TIL of Hannah Senesh, a Jewish paratrooper and poet during the Holocaust. She was captured, tortured, and eventually executed, but never gave up her comrades. "I could have been twenty-three next July; I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost."

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6kk7 TIL Matt Damon and Ben Affleck originally wrote ‘Good Will Hunting’ with an oral sex scene between the main character and his shrink to see which film execs had truly read the script. They sold the film rights to Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, the only one to mention the scene was wildly out of place
1a5Qd TIL that Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, President and General of the Mexican Army that won the battle of the Alamo, introduced the United States to chewing gum when he returned years later as a businessman.
0wjn5 TIL that Kalpana Chawla, one of the astronauts killed in the Columbia tragedy, knew Steve Morse of Deep Purple and had even taken the band’s “Machine Head” album to space with her on the mission. Morse wrote a song called “Contact Lost” as a tribute to her.
VW8m TIL that during the Parsley Massacre, the Dominican soldiers would grab a parsley plant and ask what it was called. If the person couldn’t roll the R in the Spanish word (Perejil) they were executed. Up to 30,000 people might have been killed through that method.
x6v60 TIL the location of Washington, DC in the south was the result of “dinner table bargain” compromise between Jefferson and Madison from Virginia and Hamilton from New York, where the national government would assume the state’s debts.