› added 11 months ago

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TIL that Peter Jackson has a perfect replica of Bag End in his basement. You go down to the wine cellar and pull a bottle which opens a door, then there’s a long corridor into a mock torture chamber. Then you pull a book in a bookcase, the bookcase opens, and you walk into his perfect Bag End

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0WEM TIL Dr Anna Wilkinson spent six months training a tortoise to yawn to discover whether yawning was contagious in the species. It was not and her conclusion was “a negative result is still exciting”.
vPl4L TIL that Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was a French foreign minister who served the Ancien regime, the French Revolution (surviving The Terror), Napoleon's Empire, the Restoration, Charles X, the July Revolution, and Louis Phillipe. He was extremely corrupt and helped to overthrow three governments.
RmJ6 TIL Japanese Death Row Inmates Are Not Told Their Date of Execution. They Wake Each Day Wondering if Today May Be Their Last.
gMYm9 TIL in all history people have only taken ~200k tons of gold out of the earth. To compare, when Edmund Fitzgerald went down with 26k tons of iron, it was one of dozens such freighters that's moves that much iron every single day the Great Lakes shipping lanes are open, a fraction of daily worldwide
gMVZX TIL the 1961 western film One Eyed Jacks was originally meant to be directed by Stanley Kubrick from a script written by Rod Sterling and Sam Peckinpah, but studio disputes lead to Marlin Brando directing instead, and Sterling and Peckinpah going uncredited