› added 1 year ago

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TIL of the "Mad Piper" Bill Millin, the only bagpiper to land on the beach in Normandy. While men fell around him, he played his pipes throughout the battle. A group of captured German snipers was asked why they hadn't shot him. They replied that they thought he'd gone insane and felt bad for him.

a84xZ TIL that Police Squad, forerunner to The Naked Gun, was cancelled by ABC because casual audiences couldn't keep up with the rate of jokes, claiming "the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it", stated by TV Guide as being "the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series"
Y7pbx TIL that the founder of Celestial Seasonings tea was in an extraterrestrial cult and the ideas from the cult’s source text were the inspiration for the quotes on the teabags.
MevXa TIL that every year, a regatta is held in Alice Springs. Due to the lack of water in Central Australia, contestants have to carry bottomless "boats" trough a dried-out river. When the river did carry water in 1993, the regatta became "the only regatta ever cancelled because of wet weather".
OoYyX TIL of Dr. William Moon—a one-eyed man who developed his own reading system for the blind in the 1840s after finding other methods unreliable. He called his method “Moon Code” and based it off of simplified Roman letters, which allowed almost anyone to learn it extremely quickly.
ZWQB TIL that a neutrino particle could pass through a block of lead 1 light year thick and never interact or be stopped by a single atom.