Things you were shockingly old when you learned

That's brilliant, classic pub quiz question, 'which cast member of Vicar of Dibley wrote a US #1 single?'.

that really is great, even without recognising the kids (though one was in Greatest Show In The Galaxy!)

I just learned there is a song called Baby Shark, and that everybody knows it but me. I like it.

If my gf were not a preschool teacher, I would be similarly unaware (hit me up if you need to know the latest trends among the under-five set).

doo doo doo doo doo doo

How much simple muscle strength means for balance.

I've been an occasional runner, never a lifter, but after only a few weeks of (even weight-free) ankle/thigh/hip muscle exercises in an attempt to alleviate knee pain when running, it is 100 x easier to stand still on one leg even on wobbly surface.

Somehow got stuck thinking the chinese used the abacus until I was reading a book called Alex in Numberland that points out that it was the Roman version that was called that. Should be obvious with the -us ending

N.U.Unruh sold his real drums to pay the rent then replaced them with bits and pieces he stole from building sites.
I thought somebody had nicked the drumkit thus bringing Einsturzende neubauten into the metal percussian arena.
Should have read that earlier, it's up on fromthearchives Einsturzende neubauten chronology.
Of course all true rebels in Berlin would have been squatting anyway.

I was literally listening to Baby Shark when I clicked on to this thread!

I am making a playlist to inflict it on moar people tomorrow

Dauphinoise potatoes comes from the French for dolphin.

See also the Dauphin and the region of the same name.

dauphin also means "prince" or "boy who is going to become the next king", i guess i always have imagined it to mean "potatoes in the style that the little rich entitled boy likes"

I always wondered if the Dauphin bit had any tie in to the Merovingian kings lineage starting with sea monsters, that is unless they were the escapees from troy.

BUt yeah I did wonder what the significance of dolphins was in the titling of the heir to the throne. Somehow been aware fo taht for decades and not looked much further into it.

Went to Dauphin Jr High in Enterprise, Alabama (home of the Bo-weevil Monument) for 8th grade. We were the Dauphin Dolphins.

& thin that I just learned: That Angela Thirkell, novelist that I love, was the mother of Colin MacInnes, novelist that I love (and granddaughter of Pre-Raphaelite Edward Byrne-Jones).

That George Bush Sr was older than Jimmy Carter.

How much simple muscle strength means for balance.

I've been an occasional runner, never a lifter, but after only a few weeks of (even weight-free) ankle/thigh/hip muscle exercises in an attempt to alleviate knee pain when running, it is 100 x easier to stand still on one leg even on wobbly surface.

― anatol_merklich, Friday, 30 November 2018 16:31 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i too was shockingly old when i learned this

this may be in the nature of the type of knowledge it is tbf

Been learning this bit by bit at yoga class over the last few years

andrew beetbort was orson bean’s son-in-law?!?

Been learning this bit by bit at yoga class over the last few years

Some time ago I passed a sign advertising "yoga for extremely stiff men"; can't say I wasn't tempted.

Apparently Ween's The Mollusk was the main inspiration for SpongeBob SquarePants:

https://i.redd.it/e28d1i43mw121.jpg

You know that thing where you frequent establishments on parallel streets and only upon taking some new route via a perpendicular street does your brain make the connection that these two locations are actually really near one another (and is that even a thing outside of my own fractured psyche)? So okay, I knew that the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful is named John Sebastian and I knew that the Welcome Back Kotter theme song was sung by a guy named John Sebastian but somehow it never occurred to me that they were the same dude until this morning. And now I realize that this isn't actually related to my initial example and may actually just be a sign of early-onset Alzheimer's or something.

You know that thing where you frequent establishments on parallel streets and only upon taking some new route via a perpendicular street does your brain make the connection that these two locations are actually really near one another (and is that even a thing outside of my own fractured .

You know that thing where you frequent establishments on parallel streets and only upon taking some new route via a perpendicular street does your brain make the connection that these two locations are actually really near one another (and is that even a thing outside of my own fractured psyche)? .

I get weirded out when I drive down the same street in the opposite direction to usual

It's not unusual for me to have a moment when I finally consolidate two places in my head that are actually the same place, just approached from different directions on a regular journey.

yeah for sure

Only way this happens to me now is when I play a video game.

Miss the days of being in a new town.

in london i think it's because people navigate via the tube - so there tend to be discrete pockets of locations.

Sunny refers to it as "seeing the city fold into itself," like it's one of those Al Jaffe cartoons.

How a candle works.
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, 12 November 2008 05:31 (ten years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait. how does a candle works

I like to go around London by bus when I get a chance so taht i do see what connects to what.
Have been aware of tubes giving a totally distorted view of what location fits where around the town since my mid teens. & the Tube map isn't based on the geography of the surface to any degree that you would recognise easily. probably at all since it was set up to show the interaction of tube lines.
You could find yourself having to go half way around town by tube to get between 2 points taht wouldn't take long to walk.

I guess buses aren't going to give an ideal picture since they're dictated to by traffic. & other people blocking your view of the streets. & you having to fit in what's out of view. Helps to have some spacial consciousness.

Oh & thinking about buses. I just found out last night that the bus into town ends later than the bus out of town. Worked out that every bus coming out has to return because there isn't a park up on the outskirts of town. So they've decided that they may as well make money out of the fact that the last 2 buses out of town have to go back in anyway.
Not sure how long they've been doing that . I don't remember it being on a timetable I've seen

In his 1995 travel book, Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson describes how a stranger to London would get from Bank to Mansion House using the Tube map.

He said he would take the Central Line to Liverpool Street, and then change to the Circle Line for another five stops to Mansion House. He would then emerge to find himself just 200 yards down the street where he had started from.

wait. how does a candle works

― single bed mentality (||||||||), Saturday, December 8, 2018 10:28 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was also shockingly old when I learned this. The wax or whatever in the candle is fuel that burns. Until adulthood sometime I thought the wick just burned and the wax slowed it down and melted away.

The wex is not just wex. English wex, French wex, domestic wex...

BUSES: I just figured out that my route begins the earliest because it's one of only two that goes past the bus hangar.

The wax or whatever in the candle is fuel that burns.

In a similar vein, I was in my thirties before I discovered that what Americans call "kerosene" is called "paraffin" by the English. I simultaneously discovered that "paraffin wax" was a byproduct of petroleum refining. Until then I just thought it was another name for wax and had no idea where it came from.

Well, I just this minute discovered that myself.

I remember researching and learning that, after I was puzzled as a US child reading about British arsonists always dousing things in paraffin, which would have entailed elaborate melting and dribbling.

I'm not certain why kerosene has the Greek prefix keros, which means wax, same prefix as in e.g. cerumen.

The two locations thing…when I was growing up I’d come into New York City, go record shopping on 8th st off 6th ave in the West village, then walk south into Washington square park, walk around in circles and eventually end up finishing my record shopping on St Marks st in the east Village even though I always got lost and never know how I finally found sr marks.

It was probably ten years before I realiz d it was the same street.

I moved to a totally new and much bigger town last year after living in the previous place for 11 years and seeing how differently my wife learned to get around and how we mapped the place internally was crazy. Completely different landmarks and concepts of direction and distance and everything else. And trying to match the backs of houses on one block with the fronts on another is what I always do while walking the dog.

I also learned the candle thing when I was at least 25 or 30.

And just this week I heard the common basilisk lizard that can walk on water referred to as the jesus lizard and had never once in almost thirty years realized where the band name came from.

ha, were you ogling splashing geckos like I was?

My building is directly adjacent to two sets of elevated train tracks, and the street that my building is on stops abruptly at those tracks, so between that and several one-way streets, the route from my building to anywhere else is always a bit circuitous. There are a few local businesses that I always thought of in terms of being a winding, ten-minute walk from home, but it wasn't until I'd lived here a few years and glanced out a window while taking the side stairs that I realized these businesses were literally across the street (and two sets of train tracks) from me.

I saw a bunch of headlines about Jason Momoa being from Iowa over the last few years but never dug in and figured it was the other side of the state but apparently he’s from the town I’d commute past on my way to high school. Used to be smaller and somewhat of a rural/bedroom community but these days it’s closer to a full-blown developed suburb.

Paul McCartney does not appear on The Beatles' "She Said She Said."

- "haha, macca''s being a square and won't trip with us."

I mean, dudes. Be careful what you wish for. You know '66 Paul would be the " wow, you seeing this? You must be seeing these colors, right? RIGHT? What do you mean I'm talking too much? Maybe I'm just a voice INSIDE YOUR HEAD, RIGHT?" guy.

Apparently they were rushing to get the song done because they were short a track for Revolver and had two leave on tour the next day, and Paul got salty about the number of takes they were doing and walked out. So George played the bass and sang the harmonies on the song.

Ringo doesn't appear on the first two songs on the White Album for a similar reason. Whenever I hear those first two beats of Glass Onion, I remember Marcello Carlin writing that it sounded liking him knocking on the door and asking to be let back in.

It's not unusual for me to have a moment when I finally consolidate two places in my head that are actually the same place, just approached from different directions on a regular journey.

This dis-integration of the head is so common I feel it should have a name. Could be a German name.

This morning (yes, after coffee), Brainpart One, obsessively pondering: "Where did the plastic lid to the cream bottle go? It's not on the floor. Did the kitten grab it? No, she's in the closet. I didn't put it in the cabinet, did I? Nope. Oh well."

Brainpart Two: "This garbage disposal machine sounds awfully clanky today, as though somebody had dropped a little plastic part of something in there that's now getting laboriously chewed up. Could it be a lime rind making that sound? If it was kind of dried out? Yeah, probably."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2018/dec/11/one-set-twins-two-fathers-how-common-is-superfecundation

moussa sissoko who plays for spurs is thd samd moussa sissoko that won the ballon d'or in 2019