› added 56 minutes ago

TIL when Polish javelin star Maria Andrejczyk found out about an 8 month old that needed life saving surgery, she auctioned off her Olympic silver medal to help raise some of the needed funds. A Polish store chain won it and instead of collecting the medal, they promptly announced she could keep it.

Read more cnn.com

via reddit.com

4W5a TIL 4 skateboarders in Calgary stepped in to save a woman being sexually assaulted. They scared off the assailant, then chased him down and held him until police arrested him.
OlQa TIL J. R. R. Tolkien began work on The Hobbit one day early in the 1930s, when he was marking School papers. He found a blank page. Suddenly inspired, he wrote the words, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
ojjo TIL of Anglish, a form of English where no Latin based words are used, in favor of Germanic forms, such as using “wordstock” in place of “vocabulary.”
MeVeW TIL when Gandhi's wife was stricken with pneumonia, doctors told her husband that a shot of penicillin would heal her, he refused to have "alien" medicine used and she died. Soon after, Gandhi caught malaria and, relenting from the standard applied to his wife, allowed doctors to save his life.
Z8jLB TIL about Molossia, a micronation bordering the U.S. although it's not recognized as a country by any nation, it has its own space program, money, post office and railways. Molossia is in war with east Germany, which doesn't exist since 1989.