› added 9 years ago

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TIL while writing Hot Fuzz Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright referred to the supermarket manager, Simon Skinner as being played by a “Timothy Dalton type” actor before thinking to ask Dalton himself to be in the film. To their surprise Dalton had loved Shaun of the Dead and signed on for the role.

kJlP7 TIL about Le Passe-muraille which is French that loosely translates to The passer-through-walls. It’s based on a short story published by Marcel Aymé in 1941. The sculpture is a tribute about a man who can pass through walls-
a8eWN TIL that Catherine of Aragon was married to King Henry VIII’s older brother, Arthur, for a few months before his untimely death in 1502. Because the marriage was never consummated, she was granted a papal dispensation, allowing her to marry Henry in 1509.
aZpN TIL that the USSR sent so many scientists and engineers to the gulag prisons that the government set up labs for them. While workers in the ‘Sharashka’ facilities did not have to perform hard labor like other inmates, their work was published under the names of more famous Soviet scientists.
peJA TIL There is an Oregon man who literally turned blue from drinking 10 oz of silver every day.
GAWX7 TIL about D-VHS or Digital VHS, a 50 GB VHS cassette tape capable of recording high-definition video. Released in 1998 in an attempt to save the VHS format, D-VHS was more bulky and expensive than DVDs and hard disks and failed to make headway into the video market.