› added 10 years ago

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TIL When casting his first Star Wars film, George Lucas needed a tall actor who could fit the role of Chewbacca. This led Lucas on a search which turned up Peter Mayhew, who says that all he had to do to be cast in the role of Chewbacca was stand up.

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M7BOa TIL Halloween started around 2,000 years from an ancient Celtic festival to celebrate the end of harvest season. The Gaels believed on Oct 31, the boundaries between the worlds of living and the dead got a little blurry and the dead would come back to life and wreak havoc among the living
oRJ7W TIL in the 1950s, when the CIA was fighting the Huks, a communist guerrilla movement in the Philippines, they spread rumors that evil men would be attacked by an aswang or 'vampire'. As part of psychological warfare, they punctured holes in a dead body and drained it of blood for others to find.
69lQX TIL the parents of a 12-year-old girl who earned an associate degree in studio arts with a 4.0 GPA decided to send her to high school. They feel they may have pushed her "too hard" by having her skip so many grades & they want her to have time to discover who she is beyond her academic achievements.
OdDL TIL JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller escaped military service in CivilWar by paying $300
Zoko TIL the CEO of a credit card company took a pay cut in order to raise the wages of his staff to $70,000 per year, even for the lowest-paid clerk; the average salary of the 120 person staff had been $48K per year.