› added 1 year ago

39

TIL about Chang Dai-chien, one of China’s greatest 20th-century artists. A master who exhibited at the Louvre, kept a pet gibbon, and exchanged paintings with Picasso, he was also a genius forger whose indistinguishable fakes of earlier masters fooled the world’s top museums and earned him millions.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

awRN0 TIL the origin of the term “Love” as 0 in tennis is heavily disputed. The most common belief is that it originated from the french word for egg (L’oeuf) as the shape of the zero represented an egg
PZOE TIL Stephen King never cashed the $5000 check he received for the rights of turning Shawshank Redemption into a movie. Instead, years after the movie came out, he framed the check and gave it back to Mr. Darabont with a note: “In case you ever need bail money. Love, Steve”
vPB7D TIL during filming of "The Mandalorian" TV series in 2019, the crew ran out of Stormtrooper costumes. As a solution, they contacted a local Star Wars fan group who showed up in their own handmade Stormtrooper outfits to assist with filming.
j6GEQ TIL Shortly before Paris was captured by the Nazis in 1940, French engineers cut the lift cables to the Eiffel Tower. German soldiers had to climb the entire tower in order to hoist their flag... which blew away after just few hours. Hitler himself was unable to make the climb when he visited.
5Yp8R TIL that in 1984, Disney was almost bought by MCA, the then-parent company of Universal, with the deal only falling through because of Disney’s insistence that Ron Miller, the Disney CEO at the time, be MCA president.