› added 8 years ago

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TIL Police in Clearwater, FL received 161 calls to 911 from the rooms of the Fort Harrison Hotel within a span of 11 months. Each time, Scientology security denied them entry, insisting there was no emergency.

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AyZg TIL The Beatles approached Stanley Kubrick to direct a LOTR movie starring themselves. Tolkien killed the project as a result of his hate for The Beatles. A hate developed after moving 3 doors down from The Beatles in 1964, who irked him with the “indescribable” noise from their practice sessions.
VBR0Z TIL: after rejecting a scholarship offer to Harvard at age 16 in 1931, Orson Welles travelled to Europe. While in Dublin, he walked into a theatre and claimed he was a broadway star. The manager, impressed by his audition and brashness, gave him work, and that same year, Welles made his stage debut.
gMm0b TIL The US Military still uses 8 inch floppy disks on outdated IBM computers to run the nuclear missile systems. It's because they are incredibly hard to hack. The computers are essentially air-gapped and the old IBM computers are reliable. They could run for another 40 years with spare parts.
rNdK4 TIL early credit cards were launched in "drops", wherein banks would mail unsolicited cards to tens of thousands of customers at once. The banks then leveraged that customer base to get local stores to accept the cards. Over 100 million cards were distributed before drops were made illegal in 1970.
69Eb7 TIL the story of Jonathan Daniels, a minister who saved the life of a civil rights activist by shielding her from a shotgun wielding man. He was killed instantly when the shotgun was fired.