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TIL Daddy Long Legs Spiders used to be called Shepherd Spiders; named after French shepherds who would use stilts to travel over grasslands. Not only were locals able to get around more easily, the stilts were allegedly an extremely speedy method of transport; as fast as a horse in full trot.

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V1g0 TIL Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, was so tormented as a result of his role that he gave up acting. “Other children were really mean to me…They would make the sound of the lightsaber every time they saw me.”
6D8m TIL “Weird Al” Yankovic wrote an original song called “Dare to Be Stupid” in the style of DEVO. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh: “I was in shock. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. He sort of re-sculpted that song into something else and… I hate him for it, basically.”
Kjdw TIL that in a secret 1960 operation, the CIA stole the Russian satellite Lunik overnight completely disassembling, examining, and reassembling it within 12 hours, and returned it in the morning without the Russians knowing - possibly changing the outcome of the space race.
b9Akp TIL, A Soviet dog called Strelka was the first to go to space and come back alive. She had 6 puppies and Nikita Khrushchev gifted one of them to JFK. (It was checked for listening devices first).
6EwKW TIL: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, designed by the “Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons,” so isolated prisoners that many went insane. (The 1829 castle-like complex did have better comforts than period prisons --like dependable heat. Shut: 1971, ruin-park since '94.)