› added 5 years ago

87

TIL of Walraven van Hall, a Dutch banker who during WW2 set up a shadow bank to finance the Dutch resistance movement.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

8e7B4 TIL that the Sultan of Morocco proposed a joint Anglo-Moroccan invasion of the West Indies that would expel Spain from the Caribbean and place their former colonies under joint Moroccan-English rule. Queen Elizabeth was intrigued but both she and the Sultan died in 1603, scuttling any plans.
neY8o TIL That a study on drinking alcohol found that the amount of shrinkage in the hippocampus — the brain area associated with memory and reasoning — was related to the amount people drank. Those who had four or more drinks a day had almost six times the risk of hippocampal shrinkage as did nondrinkers
e4Wb TIL the lyrics for the song “Suicide is Painless”, the theme song for the film Mash were written by the director’s 14 year-old son. He made over a million dollars in royalties while his father only made$70,000 for directing.
yQjJM TIL many of the modern holiday standards, including "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer", "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", "A Holly Jolly Christmas", "Silver and Gold", and "Run Rudolph Run" were written by a single Jewish American songwriter named Johnny Marks.
Yp00d TIL in order to keep Genghis Khan’s burial site a secret, Khan’s successors killed anyone who witnessed his funeral procession. Some 800 soldiers are said to have massacred the 2,000 people who attended his funeral, before being summarily executed themselves.