› added 2 years ago

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TIL about Toto Koopman, a Dutch-Indonesian model who worked as a spy for the Dutch Resistance in WWII, escaped imprisonment several times, pretended to be a nurse and forged papers to rescue women from the gas chamber and later became an archaeologist as well as found an influential art gallery.

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EgV4x TIL that the Emperor Domitian (1st century AD) was so sensitive about his baldness that he wrote a book on the subject of hair care.
OG7xX TIL Paramount Pictures bought the rights to the Godfather book for only $80,000 before the book was popular. The book went on to sell 9 million copies in two years and remained on the New York Times best seller list for 67 weeks. It became the best selling published work in history for several years
0MWL TIL cultural baggage may cause plane crashes and mountain climbing disasters. In a study of 5,000 Himalayan expeditions, scientists found that Chinese alpinists, for instance, were more likely to die on the mountain than Austrians.
69PPQ TIL of the life of Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, a Hungarian jew who was sucessively a Protestant missionary, Anglican priest, British Member of Parliament for Darlington, German right-wing politician and spy, Nazi collaborator, Buddhist abbot in China, and self-proclaimed Dalai Lama.
X1w8 TIL because he was too big to fit on the bus, Andre the Giant was driven to school by his neighbor. That neighbor was Samuel Beckett.