› added 5 years ago

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TIL Buster Keaton was an international mega silent movie star, but broke down after sound movies took over. He became an alcoholic and was institutionalized in a mental ward but escaped his strait jacket using techniques he learned from Houdini. He then married his nurse but had no memory of it.

OoXE6 TIL that the Superman actor Henry Cavil has been an avid PC gamer since childhood and even missed the call to play Superman because he was playing the game World of Warcraft
nel5b TIL during The Great War, China sent 185,000 workers (100,000 in UK, 35,000 in France, 50,000 in Russia) to work in the European front, for various tasks: unloading military goods, digging trenches, constructing barracks and field hospitals, burying victims of war, working in armament factories.
b5wE TIL the Amazon Rainforest loses about 22,000 tons of the phosphorus in its soil due to floods every year. The Amazon remains so fertile because the dust of a dried up lake in the Sahara Desert traveling through the atmsophere feeds the Amazon’s plants the phosphorus it lost.
Oojl1 TIL A West Virginia prison charges prisoners 3-5c per minute to read books on tablets despite prisoners making 4-58c per hour.
Xvaj TIL that Prince performed a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” at Coachella, but forced YouTube to remove footage that fans had taken of the performance. YouTube reinstated the videos after Radiohead demanded for them to remain on the site claiming “it’s our song, let people hear it.”