› added 12 years ago

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TIL in 1978, the USS Stein was found to have been attacked by a squid. The ship’s hull suffered cuts over 8% of its surface. From one particularly complete imprint they discovered that the squid was significantly larger than any species of squid that had been discovered at the time.

WEGB TIL ‘Playboy’ once featured a short story about heterosexual men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. In response to angry letters Hefner wrote, “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too.”
5Yob8 TIL that David Attenborough is the only person to have received BAFTAs for programs in five different video formats: black and white, colour, HD, 3D and 4K.
rNM4x TIL that Robert De Niro originally auditioned for the role of Sonny in The Godfather, but lost the part to James Caan. De Niro later went on to win an Oscar for playing young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II.
XNG8 TIL that the television show Top Gear, sponsored by Shell, staged breakdowns of the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Roadster, to make electric cars seem unviable and inferior to petrol powered vehicles, and causing doubt to Tesla investors
9Y9aX TIL Japanese Gen. Kuribayashi knew he was facing unsurmountable odds during the invasion of Iwo Jima. He forbade standard Japanese banzai charges, leading an American general to say he was "one smart bastard." At the end, he inflicted 26k American casualties while fighting with "emaciated men."