› added 2 years ago

71

TIL: That over 60 towns were scouted as possible shoot locations for the movie Groundhog Day. Though relatively remote, it was felt that Woodstock, Illinois offered the timeless quality that the filmmakers sought. The town even came with a large pothole for Phil (Bill Murray) to step in.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

yVaAl TIL Aleksey Grigorievich Bobrinsky was the illegitimate son of Catherine the great who started a house fire to hide his birth; his son Aleksey Alekseyevich Bobrinsky founded the first sugar refinery in the Russian Empire and financed some of the first rail lines in the Empire.
b6e8Q TIL that Neanderthals living 90,000 years ago in Portugal had a taste for a seafood delicacy that's still popular today, and regularly caught and ate crabs, roasting them on coals and cracking them open with stone tools.
xxwk TIL of Jack Whittaker, who won the largest jackpot in history and donated much of his winnings, before a string of horrible luck. He was robbed, lost his wife to divorce and his granddaughter and daughter to suicide. He later said that winning the lottery was the worst thing to ever happen to him.
8adBa TIL the CIA paid magician John Mulholland $3,000 to write a spy manual of trickery and deception as part of the top-secret MKUltra project, a CIA program that investigated mind control. Mulholland’s 1953 guide was supposed to be destroyed in the 1970s but an archived copy reappeared decades later.
e0VAE TIL in the first draft of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Holy Grail was discovered at Harrods department store, at the Holy Grail counter.