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TIL that in the 50s and 60s, American chiropractors held a series of rather unusual beauty pageants where contestants were judged and winners picked not only by their apparent beauty and poise, but also their standing posture (backed with X-rays of their spines, of course).

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OGLJ7 TIL that Konrad Schumann, the subject of the famous photo of a soldier escaping communist East Berlin to the capitalist West, went to visit his family in former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They rejected him, considering him a traitor, and he committed suicide several years later.
7G5Z TIL after receiving complaints about the size of their sandwiches, Subway responded “‘Subway Footlong’ is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold … and not intended to be a measurement of length.”
69MYQ TIL that Andrée de Jongh, the mastermind that led the Comet Line during WWII, was saved from execution because Gestapo officers did not believe that such a small young girl could lead such an operation. The network, consisting of mainly young women, smuggled shot down airmen from Belgium to Spain.
xVlOD TIL that McDonalds once aired a commercial in the U.K. where a boy grieving his dead father feels better after eating a filet o' fish sandwich.
9w7MX TIL that following a deadly avalanche in 1962, Peruvian authorities were warned of the potential for a much larger slide to occur by a group of American climbers. These warnings were not only ignored but actively suppressed. 8 years later the deadliest avalanche in history occurred, killing 30k