› added 11 years ago

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TIL Chinese guerrillas during WWII were given bags of flour, mixed with the powdery white high explosive HMX, to bypass Japanese checkpoints. The resulting mixture could safely be cooked into pancakes and eaten. Leftover dough and pastries could still be used as explosives. Code name: “Aunt Jemima.”

b90mN TIL of Benjamin Ferencz. A Transylvanian-born 99 year old lawyer who was chief prosecutor in the Einzatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg. In 2016 he donated $1m to the Washington Holocaust Museum. Not only does he still continue to work to this day, but he does 125 push ups every morning
XEYk TIL that Pinocchio actually kills the cricket, imprisons his maker for 3 years, bites off a cats hand, kills a snake by making it explode from laughing too hard, almost gets eaten by an ogre, and turns into a donkey
gMQbL TIL After bragging to fellow insurgents about shooting down a Chinook with an RPG which killed 38 US and Afghan army personnel, US intelligence traced and tracked the individual before dropping four 500lb bombs on his truck and following up with attacks by a C-130 gunship and Apache helicopters
xVvL0 TIL Francis Coppola was worried his film Apocalypse Now would be a box office flop and could bankrupt him, so he decided to quickly make a happy musical to recoup his losses. In the end Apocalypse Now was a success, but the happy musical (One From the Heart) was a disaster and bankrupted him anyway
6EZ77 TIL Xiao Yuan once replaced 140+ paintings in a museum with his own forgeries, and sold 125 for $6 million dollars. He later found out his own fakes were being stolen and replaced with yet more copies.