› added 10 years ago

107

TIL Knocker Upper , before alarm clockswere affordable or reliable. A knocker-up’s job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time. They used a truncheon or short, heavy stick to knock on the clients’ doors or a long and light stick to reach windows on higher floors.

D1rpD TIL that Petra, the Blue Peter dog for 15 years, who was so loved there is even a statue of her at BBC television centre, was actually a replacement. The original Petra died two days after her debut and the show makers hastily found a lookalike to avoid upsetting the viewers.
kXk4 TIL that the Tarantula Nebula, a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud over 160,000 light years distant, contains the most luminous known star. The nebula’s luminosity is so great that if it were as close to Earth as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula Nebula would cast shadows on the ground.
dDxNd TIL that Michael Jackson’s first no.1 solo single (and later album title track), “Ben”, was originally recorded as the title track of a horror movie about a killer rat.
wLyAJ TIL : In 2010, blooper footage surfaced in which ALF was made to deliver racial jokes and sexual comments. He was actually mocking a then-recent episode of L.A. Law dealing with Tourette syndrome. Producer Steve Lamar stated that the footage was from an era when things were not so "ridiculously PC".
oBjMr Today I learned that Steve Jobs had Apple first create a prototype of an iPad and then pivoted to launching the iPhone first.