› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Alec Guinness, the actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original trilogy, hated the film and described it as “fairy tale rubbish” and persuaded George Lucas to kill off Obi-Wan because he “couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines” and he “had enough of the mumbo jumbo”.

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PY6aZ TIL in 1984 javelin thrower Uwe Hohn threw a distance of 104.8m and became the first and only athlete in history to break the 100m barrier. Shortly afterwards some changes in the design of javelins were implemented and the records had to be restarted, turning his mark into an "eternal world record".
7807Z TIL that from 1958 to 2002 it was tradition for the newly elected French President to pardon traffic offenses for the 6-12 months before the election. President Chirac ended the tradition because of the substantial rise in traffic deaths and injuries it caused.
0O7R TIL that after getting fired in 1996, Timothy Lloyd, an 11-year employee of OMEGA, planted a hacking “time bomb” within the firm’s computer systems that deleted the firm’s main operating software two weeks after his lay-off, making the firm lose over $10 million and fire 80 employees.
rNEbx TIL the Beach Boys didn't get their first number-one in the USA ("I Get Around") until their sixth album, "All Summer Long", which is considered one of the first true concept albums
OGy6g TIL the Myers-Briggs personality test was made by two women without any formal education in the field of Psychology, most of the research supporting its validity come from the Myers-Briggs foundation, and it is widely considered to be just pseudo-science in accademic circles.