› added 9 years ago

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TIL Of more than 10 million enslaved Africans to reach the Western Hemisphere, less than 4% of the total came to North America. To be dwarfed by 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch & Danish holdings in the Caribbean and 4.8 million to Brazil.

b9n94 TIL Alan Rickman and Alfonso Cuaron played a practical joke on Daniel Radcliffe while filming ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’ where they placed a fart machine in his sleeping bag, positioned himself next to a girl he fancied, and set the farts off during a take that had taken ages to get.
yQAm8 TIL of Herman Perry, an African-American WWII soldier who killed an officer and escaped into the Burmese jungle. Black soldiers were treated harshly and he had already been confined before. He won over and lived with a Naga tribe before he was found, then escaped again, then caught again and hung.
VMJwm TIL that paint typically adds around 600 to 1,200 pounds (273 - 544kg) to the weight of a plane. And the seven coats of paint on the Emirates A380 added roughly 2,425 pounds (1,100kg) to it's weight.
LD5p TIL a radio station played N.W.A.’s song Express Yourself for 24 hours as a protest against censorship after being forced to stop playing Fuck tha Police
8W1V TIL a journalist suffered a massive stroke, woke up completely paralyzed except for his left eyelid, and wrote his memoir over the course of ten months just by blinking. He died 10 days after the book was released to fantastic reviews.