› added 10 years ago

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TIL that, despite having sold 40 million records worldwide, Rick Astley abruptly retired from music in 1993, at the age of 27, in order to spend more time with his newborn daughter. He wouldn’t produce any new material for the next 10 years, and it was another 14 before he went back on tour.

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9wwNQ TIL about General Santa Anna’s wooden leg. The leg was captured by an Illinois regiment in 1847 and is now on display at the Illinois State Military Museum.
W7k88 TIL: About the naval term - broom at the masthead. It meant that a vessel had made a clean sweep of enemy vessels. Ships literally hung a broom from the mast of a ship. Commonly used in WW2, it dates back to the 17th century.
VMOGk TIL that Robin Williams was persuaded to star in Aladdin, after animators showed him several test sequences of the Genie performing his stand-up routines. He was impressed by one sequence in particular; of the Genie growing another head to argue with himself.
bOB4 TIL Peter The Great accepted his wife be executed after she killed her newborn baby. When he showed up at the execution, the crowd assumed he’d stop the execution, but instead he watched her executed, kissed her detached head and used it to explain to the crowd the intracacies of neck anatomy.
P14lO TIL in 1952, more than 100,000 U.S. Army troops descended on Lampasas, Texas as part of Operation Longhorn, a military exercise that trained soldiers how to retake a town from communist invaders