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TIL because the producers of The Lord of the Rings had difficulty finding men with horseback riding experience to play the extra soldiers, many of the "Riders of Rohan" were actually women.

NXwlQ TIL about the "invisible wall," an anomaly where workers encountered a strange "invisible wall" in the area under a fast-moving sheet of electrically charged polypropelene film in a factory. This "invisible wall" was strong enough to prevent humans from passing through.
W7ad TIL in 1917 Germans built a 25-foot-tall armor-plated fake tree with a soldier sitting in it to spy on Allied forces. the Germans waited until nightfall and cut down one of the real trees to replace it with the fake one With artillery firing the whole time so the Brits wouldn’t hear the axes.
5Vwxr TIL that Frank Zappa intended his 1982 song “Valley Girl” to be a mocking satire of California’s teen culture, but ironically, the song’s success instead popularized the “valley girl” accent nationwide. So much so, that a film titled “Valley Girl” was released a year later.
9w0ZD TIL in 1874, the Freedman’s Savings Bank, created to help African Americans build wealth, collapsed due to mismanagement and fraud. Over 60,000 Black Americans lost about $3M in savings, devastating trust in financial institutions and crippling Black economic progress many decades.
kk7 TIL 35 years ago today, a major thunderstorm led to a major blackout in New York City, allowing city residents to see the Milky Way Galaxy