› added 5 years ago

145

TIL about Lt Commander Joseph Vaghi. He was an US Beachmaster during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, acting as a "traffic cop" orienting the landing troops. Giving orders under heavy machine gun fire, he ran into an old classmate, who asked him, "Hi Joe, what the hell are you doing here?"

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neEZB TIL: Because of a botched surgery intended to repair a severely perforated eardrum, that actually caused permanent inner ear damage, Stephen Colbert wasn't able to scuba dive for a marine biology job he wanted which pushed him to comedy. The damage to his eardrum also left him deaf in his right ear.
J17Xv TIL Mama is an (almost) universal word
RkO7 TIL that there is a hidden spy room at an AT&T building in downtown San Francisco that splits all incoming communications traffic, copying this information to the NSA. This room has been operational since at least 2003 and has been publicly known to exist since 2006.
5V7JR TIL if you're 21 or over in Michigan you can legally drive with a bodily alcohol contact up to .08 but if you're under 21 it's .02, so a 20-year-old is "drunk driving" at an .03 but a 21-year-old can legally drive up to .07
QQEe TIL if you microwave a sliced grape, it can explode in a fireball of super-heated plasma.