› added 11 years ago

92

TIL Audie Murphy, when asked after the war why he had seized the machine gun of a burning M10 tank destroyer and taken on an entire company of German infantry, he replied simply, “They were killing my friends.”

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Y6Vd TIL of a stinging tree called the Gympie Gympie. It secretes a toxin that is so painful that is has driven humans and animals to suicide. It feels like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted simultaneously. A man shot himself after using a leaf from the tree as toilet paper.
o5Er TIL in the original pitch for Bob’s Burgers the family were actually cannibals that made their burgers out of human flesh. FOX found the idea to be too dark.
RxD4 TIL Leonardo DiCaprio was holding up filming on ‘Django Unchained’ due to his reluctance to use racial epithets at his fellow actors. Samuel L. Jackson finally pulled him aside, explaining 'Motherfucker, this is just another Tuesday for us’
wLd1P TIL the phrase being on "cloud nine" actually comes from a cloud atlas published in 1896 that divides clouds into 10 basic types, the ninth type being cumulonimbus clouds, the most puffy-looking ones. See A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Part V Chapter 17 Into the Troposphere.
Dn4J TIL that despite being a minor background detail, the roaches in Half-Life had AI that would seek out food and react to other creatures and changes in the environment