› added 4 years ago

97

TIL UK's highest-paid entertainer in WW2, George Formby, went to Normandy after the landings, & gave 9 shows to frontline troops who’d held out for 56 days without relief, his audience in foxholes. He also crawled through trenches to tell jokes when the enemy was too close for a show.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

oB80Y TIL Lonzo Ball admitted his injuries with the Lakers were due to his own $495 Big Baller Brand shoes. “And it’s crazy because right when I’d switch my shoes, and then all of a sudden I got good again.”
5KNR TIL Agatha Christie’s novel “Elephants Can Remember” reveals distinct signs of Alzheimer’s onset, e.g., 20% fewer words or ⅕ of her vocabulary lost; 6 times more use of nonspecific words such as “thing”, and a sharp drop in “idea density”. That novel’s last line is “Maybe it’s OK not to remember.”.
VMDXG TIL of Waverly Woodson, a black medic who treated at least 200 injured men on D-Day while injured himself. As he hit the beach a shell tore apart his landing craft, filling him with shrapnel. Despite this, he set up an aid station and treated wounds for 30 hours, at one point even amputating a foot.
N7m8M TIL that Shakespeare’s scripts contain over 2200 never-before-seen words—a diverse collection of loan-words from foreign languages, compound words from existing English terms, nouns turned into verbs, and creatively applied prefixes—many of which have entered into everyday language.
yQRkJ TIL that more than 80% of amputees can still feel their missing limb for up to 3 years after amputation