› added 5 years ago

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TIL that officer Ronald Speirs, just after being assigned commander of the E Company in January 1945 during the battle of Foy, ran through the German-occupied town and lines, linked up with the I Company soldiers on the other part of town and then proceeded to run back through without a scratch.

4k0m6 TIL Tibetan monks practice chöd, a ritual involving meditation in haunted places and visualizing offering their own bodies to spirits as a feast. They spend nights in graveyards, aiming to dissolve ego, confront mortality, and transcend fear, achieving compassion and detachment by embracing death.
wLPbJ TIL beloved WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle was responsible for military troops receiving higher pay when in combat. Pyle felt that ground troops were at equal risk as airmen and that 'flight pay' should extend to 'fight pay'. It became the Ernie Pyle bill.
01e5 TIL That you don’t really need to brush twice a day AFTER meals. Brushing is really just about cleaning the plaque which houses microbes on your teeth. It’s better to clear the plaque before meals so that your meals don’t feed the plaque which feeds the teeth-damaging microbes.
OG5xL TIL that Jared Fogle first came to media attention in April 1999 because of an article published in the Indiana Daily Student written by a former dormmate about Fogle losing 245 lb (111 kg) by exercising and eating a diet of Subway sandwiches.
KOyWE TIL: Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" didn't have a musical soundtrack because he wanted the auditory focus of the movie to be on the unsettling and experimental electronic sounds produced by a strange instrument called the trautonium, a predecessor to the analogue synthesizer.