› added 12 years ago

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TIL that during the thunderous applause following his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech to the to the House of Commons in 1940, Winston Churchill whispered to a colleague, “And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!”.

R5nJ7 TIL of the 1991 Downing Street mortar attack, in which IRA members launched three mortars at No. 10 Downing Street during a cabinet meeting, attempting to kill John Major. One hit the lawn 30 yards away, and it is believed that if this mortar had hit the building the entire cabinet would have died.
N7ZYN TIL after the prohibition in the US, about one-third of the states established government monopolies to control the sale of alcohol. These monopolies still exist in 17 states. They're generally known as ABC Stores.
eJ75 TIL the line from The Martian, “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this” isn’t translatable into several other languages. In the French translation: “I’ll have to shit out a lot of science to get out of this.” In Russian, “Only science can pull me out of this shit”.
E1kpV TIL of Gennady Korotkevich, currently the world's top competitive programmer, derived Archimedes theory of buoyancy in a national programming competition in his 2nd grade.
9lRr TIL that in 2008 there was a music festival called ‘Festival of the fuck bands’, where bands such as Fucked Up, Holy Fuck and Fuck buttons performed. It was held in Fucking, Austria.