Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Your occasional reminder that the main villain in the Take On Me video (who pursues Morten Harket with a pipe wrench) is played by Philip Jackson, who was Chief Inspector Japp in Poirot. pic.twitter.com/hX4HsHCKLb

— Jason (@NickMotown) January 30, 2022

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No feckin' way!

Grendel isn’t a dragon

My dad called me today to inform me that "Tangled Up in Blue" is a series of sonnets.

I'll have to check that out! It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I took a look and it kind of works! Not the meter, I don't think, and the rhyme scheme is similar but not the same. But it does (arguably) divide into sections of three quatrains followed by a final couplet, as in a Shakespearean sonnet.

Though to make this work you have to consider the last line Dylan sings before "tangled up in blue" - e.g. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view" to be two lines, the last line of the third quatrain and the first line of the couplet. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point/ of view / tangled Up in blue."

James Williamson and Ron Asheton were in the same band at different times as early as the mid 60s. Hadn't realised until Williamson posted a photo of the Chosen Few from his time and said that.
He did apparently meet Asheton and Pop because of taht band though. BUt Asheton joined on bass after Williamson left.

That there's a UK Dennis the Menace in addition to our US Dennis the Menace... he seems more willfully naughty than the U.S. version.

The weird part is that they were both first published on March 12th, 1951; apparently just a coincidence.

Yeah, we got the US Dennis over here as an animated series, but he was just “Dennis”

And I think the UK version is titled "Dennis and Gnasher" outside the UK

the notoriously litigious DC Thomson must have been really fucked off. I joined the Dennis The Menace fan club and all I got was two badges and a membership card. The furry Gnasher badge was not very well made iirc.

Until recently I thought "consumption" (as it often appeared in old literature and movies, as in "she died of consumption") was a euphemism for alcohol-related illness, as opposed to it being just another name for tuberculosis

It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I just now learned that from reading your post.

I'm not an expert on rock festival history, but I was surprised to learn that Lou Rawls was one of the performers at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Liam is short for William

Ope! I did not know that!

I learned something today and thought of this thread but I forgot what it was.

Billy Gallagher.

Liam and Topher Hemsworth

The Muppet's Statler and Waldorf are named after the New York hotels.

I knew Waldorf is a hotel, but didn't know of Statler, so just thought it was a random name they chose.

One could also say The Statler Brothers were indirectly named after the Statler hotel chain, since they were named after a brand of facial tissue that was named after the Statler Hotel in Boston.

That wildebeests are the same thing as gnus

Things you never gnu

...and things you never wil

(debeest)

I thought that was a blunderbuss.

"no gnus is good gnus"--gary gnu

I'm a sucker for a solid Great Space Coaster reference

You gotta be shockingly old to know that show.

:(

all i'll say is it will soon be legal for me to open the ilxors in their 50s thread.

welcome to the bracket

Yesterday I learned that in American football offensive and defensive "lines" have totally different players who take and leave the field in turn, and have no overlap of people. I thought it was like soccer where you have the same players and a bench of alternates.

I went to every high school home game for 5 years in the '90s and I just never...noticed?

A lot of high school teams used to have "two-way" players. I understand that it's less common nowadays, but not unheard of.

Arena Football actually did the two-way thing for years before they started allowing limited substitutions, to become more like traditional american football.

it also sucked

I was like "Who are those players looking sweaty on the sidelines, is that in real time? Shouldn't they be...playing?"

get on board for the great space coaster to your sixties

Hey I loved Great Space Coaster! And Krofft Superstars as well. Both in constant after-school syndication rotation circa 1981. Gary Gnu melds seamlessly into Sigmund the Sea Monster in my head.

Stations programmed shows in complementary pairs, and these pairings became irrelevant after cable and subsequently streaming. I feel these pairings should be documented before all us Olds lose our brains to dementia.

For me: Happy Days with Laverne & Shirley. I Dream of Jeannie with Bewitched. Flipper with Gidget. Green Acres with Beverly Hillbillies. Jeffersons with Good Times. What's Happening, Diff'rent Strokes, and Sanford & Son are also in this mix. (Fuck you, Cosby, you didn't pioneer shit.)

Alice with One Day at a Time, plus Facts of Life and Family Ties. Knight Rider with Magnum PI. Sometimes Kojak or Hawaii 5-0 or Matlock are in this mix. Then there's Greatest American Hero, Wonder Woman, etc.

Then the cartoon shows like He-Man and She-Ra (usually paired). Speed Racer and Jonny Quest.

A vanished world of lying on a terrible carpet eating something indefensible, every afternoon, all afternoon. Saturday morning was worse.

And we're now the parents who are supposed to limit "screen time"?

The "Soul Train" intro was the signal that Saturday morning cartoons were over.

Re: Al Capp from the 'Great Assholes' thread...

Frank Frazetta drew a whole bunch of Lil' Abner comic strips... like thousands of them. News to me.

I also have vague memories of these pairings. In Boston, Diff'rent Strokes was paired with Silver Spoons, and then there was the amazing pairing of Star Blazers with "Force Five", which was a show that featured a different mecha anime on each of the five weekdays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Five

wow, those last two were simply not on my radar screen. Clearly I missed out on televised awesomeness galore. But it inspires me to add Transformers / GI Joe to my list of pairings.

Anyway. Maybe this is more of a "Things you were shockingly old before you thought very much about," but this review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/10/metaphysical-animals-review-four-women-who-changed-philosophy

points out that during WWII a whole heck of a lot of college-age British men were someplace else, doing something else. One of the results was an efflorescence of women in philosophy.

I have long been a fan of Iris Murdoch's fiction. I like her philosophical dialogues and writing on Platonic aesthetics (Acastos, The Fire Behind the Sun). I find her book on metaphysics kinda opaque, though. I got some exposure to Philippa Foot in college but don't remember much.

Anyway, I had not considered how much their careers were advanced by the absence of the people who would likely have told them to sit down and be quiet.

The "Soul Train" intro was the signal that Saturday morning cartoons were over.

It was that or "The ABC Weekend Special" that was always some boring ass drama like its cousin, "The ABC Afternoon Special".

That book would open up in the intro and once I saw those two baseball kids pointing at each other, I realized that the fun was over.

Would get so upset when a Cubs afternoon game would preempt Transformers! Which was often, before Wrigley Field had lights.

one thing that happened every day during the Star Blazers/Force Five block, that I was obsessed with even though I never actually got to do it myself, was that they'd have this asteroids-style video game during one of the commercial breaks. It was like targeting crosshairs with asteroids floating around the screen. Kids could call in to a particular phone number, and one lucky kid would get to shout "Fire! Fire!" live on tv in order to shoot the asteroids, and if they shot enough they'd win some sort of prize.

I've heard about that before! That's wild.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3RtR2JVHEA

^ - the NYC WPIX version

Frank Frazetta drew a whole bunch of Lil' Abner comic strips... like thousands of them. News to me.

this is supposedly the only one he drew solo