› added 10 years ago

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TIL that the Coelacanth and the Lungfish are more closely related to Mammals than to other Ray-Finned fish

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j6yDa TIL that Wajda's classic "Ziemia obiecana"/"Promised Land" was supposed to be distributed in USA, but according to Wajda distributors there bought the rights only to keep the film out of cinemas. Scorsese's 2013 Festival described it as "one of the most important critiques of predatory capitalism".
a0QA TIL during WW2 a Russian pilot was shot down over Nazi German, draged himself 18 days to Soviet territory and had to have his legs amputated. Afterward, he mastered his prosthetics and returned to flying combat missions.
69oNQ TIL that in addition to there being cardinal numbers (1, 2, 3) and ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd), there are also cardinal directions (N/E/W/S) and ordinal directions (NE/SE/NW/SW).
AMdg TIL that Spanish Flu didn’t come from Spain or hit it especially hard. Spain didn’t have the wartime censors other countries had, so Spanish media could report freely on the pandemic. This made it look like the situation in Spain was especially severe - resulting in the nickname “Spanish flu”.
OoMe6 TIL that in 1917 you could order a belt-fed machine gun from a Sears catalog: "Machine guns are used largely by police organizations, home guards and municipalities in case of riots."