› added 11 years ago

80

TIL the actor Thomas Kretschmann, who appeared in King Kong and The Pianist, made a month-long trek from East to West Germany to escape communism when he was 19. He crossed 4 borders with only a passport and the equivalent of $100 and lost part of his finger to frostbite.

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e0gM6 TIL a tiny English village twinned itself with Paris after writing to the Mayor of Paris proposing a twinning, receiving no reply, assuming it was fine, and so put up road signs declaring it official.
k8y5 TIL that Bank of America hired three intelligience firms to dismantle wikileaks, instucted by the Department of Justice. Anonymous hacked these in response.
eKB6 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.
Ay0w TIL After Tom Waits denied Audi permission to use his song “Innocent while you dream”, they did so anyway and he succesfully sued them, afterwards saying “Now they understand the words to the song better… It wasn’t Innocent When You Scheme, it was Innocent When You Dream.”
WkyXX TIL that an individual red knot bird, tagged as B-95, has flown the distance to the moon and halfway back over his lifetime.