› added 3 years ago

105

TIL that Steven Van Zandt, guitarist with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, originally auditioned for the lead role of Tony in The Sopranos. HBO didn't think he would work as a lead since he never acted before, so creator David Chase wrote him Sylvio Dante, a character that Steven had created.

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x6Vrk TIL of the "royal touch", a medieval practice wherein monarchs touched one of their subjects suffering from an illness, thereby supposedly curing them of said illness
R7Qvw TIL Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children. The family spawned 50 musicians and several notable composers: Joahnnes (a piper), Christoph (an instrumentalist), Johann Ambrosius (a violinist), and Veit (a white bread baker whose greatest pleasure was playing the Cittern).
OoRA6 TIL that Abe Lincoln won the 1860 election while NOT being on the presidential ballot in 10 Southern states.
glQ4 TIL the Tsar bomba was so powerful it broke window panes 560 miles away, equivalent to the approx. distance from London to Berlin or Manhattan to Charlotte, NC.
MR8A TIL that Mark Twain was born on the day of the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1835, and died on the day of its next appearance in 1910