› added 9 years ago

77

TIL when the Titanic wireless operator got a message from a nearby ship saying they were surrounded by ice … he responded “Shut up, shut up, I am busy …” … and hit the iceberg 45 minutes later

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QJGp9 TIL Liu Xiaobo, the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China, was imprisoned 4 times for his human rights activism and spent more than 13 years in prison since his return to China in 1989.
ZpYo TIL that, whilst fighting in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell was shot through the neck. The bullet missed his main artery by a fraction, but he fully recovered - going on to write Animal Farm and 1984, amongst others.
R50pa TIL George Lucas’s dog, an Alaskan malamute named Indiana, was often taken by the Lucases on car drives and called their ‘furry copilot’. He was an inspiration for Chewbacca and the source of Indiana Jones’ name.
GAw14 TIL Mexican actress Silvia Pinal smuggled the last remaining copy of the film Virdiana out of Spain after the Vatican ordered all other copies destroyed
R59r8 TIL in 1975, there were 2 crude oil tanker spills on January 31st. The Corinthos Spill in the Delaware River and the Epic Colocotronis Spill in Puerto Rico dumped a combined 28.5 million gallons of oil into surrounding waters.