› added 8 years ago

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TIL that Walt Disney created multiple fake companies (like M.T. Lott Real Estate) to buy Florida land in the 1960s. This let him acquire what is now Disney World while avoiding suspicion and keeping prices low. The stores on Main Street shop windows are the names of those original companies.

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OoAoX TIL The name "Sri Lanka" does not come from the fact that it is by far the biggest island off India's coast (Lanka just means "island"). The honorific "Sri" came with the independence movement in British Ceylon. So the name doesn't mean "Lord Island" or "Great Island" but rather "Sovreign Island".
gMbGb TIL Roger Ebert gave four stars to the panned 2007 adaptation of Philip Pullman's classic fantasy novel "The Golden Compass"
l77MK TIL just after WW2, the US occupied two provinces of Northern China with 50,000 marines to repatriate the 600,000+ Japanese soldiers and Korean conscripts still in China after the war since neither Japan nor either side of the Chinese Civil War were logistically capable of doing so at the time.
JYjBv [TIL] Sir Thomas “Tommy” Macpherson rode into Nazi territory wearing Highlander regalia and bluffed a Major General and his 23,000 troops (including part of a panzer division) into surrendering. Macpherson was later knighted and appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
VMW1B TIL of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. An archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland which is the last piece of French territory in North America.