› added 13 years ago

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TIL a Nisei soldier had his arm shot off as he was about to throw a grenade into a German bunker and then pried the grenade from his severed hand and threw it into the bunker, taking it out. Oh yeah, he’s also the most senior US Senator.

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LEOm TIL: a study showed that Harry Potter fans “tend be more open to diversity; politically tolerant; less authoritarian; less likely to support the use of deadly force or torture; more politically active; and are more likely to have a negative view of the Bush administration.”
J1l5Q TIL in 1973, the US Army made an anti-tank grenade football by hollowing out a Nerf football and filling it with explosive charges. It was thought most American troops were familiar with how to throw a football.
5YOQr TIL when F. Scott. Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, accused him of being homosexual with Ernest Hemmingway, Fitzgerald went and slept with a prostitute to show Zelda how straight he really was.
awgbN TIL of James Martin Stagg, a meteorologist for the allies in WW2 tasked with finding the day with the right conditions for the D-Day invasion. His team and him predicted that the weather would clear up on June 6th, which the Germans didn’t predict. He was right and D-Day was successful.
mD6x TIL that the idea that people used to think that the world was flat is actually a modern misconception and “with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat”