› added 8 years ago

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TIL Hugh Hefner was tried on obscenity charges in Chicago in 1963, but the jury was hung.

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KOMAJ TIL BMW used prisoners from concentration camps like Dachau to build their cars and plane engines during the second world war. By the end of the war, almost 50% of the 50,000-person workforce at BMW consisted of prisoners from concentration camps.
kJZgB TIL that Simpsons character Troy McClure’s surname was derived from IRL actor Doug McClure, whose daughters nicknamed him “Troy McClure” behind his back; he reportedly found the parody to be funny.
KYm6G TIL the Trout memo (1939) compared wartime deception to fly fishing. Issued by Admiral Godfrey, whose assistant was Ian Fleming (James Bond creator), it inspired Operation Mincemeat. This plan put fake documents on a corpse, fooling the Germans into expecting an attack on Greece instead of Sicily
5YQBp TIL Tyrannosaurus rex was originally thought to have walked fully upright like a kangaroo, and was posed this way in numerous books and movies until the 1970s. Jurassic Park helped present a revised depiction of its posture to the public.
9kOQ TIL that two thirds of Denmark’s income used to come from charging people to enter or leave the Baltic sea, those that refused to pay were sunk