Things you were shockingly old when you learned

just tonight i learned that in french you put a space BEFORE question marks, exclamation marks, colons and semicolons! ??!?!? this is madness !

Oh holy shit, I wasn't checking the right punctuation marks. You're right: they do have a space before exclamation marks.

But def not before question marks in the RC article.

yeah not the others though. huh.

I realized last week that the Fleetwood Mac song I thought was called "Surrender" was actually the mythically famous song by them that I thought I'd never heard before, "Rhiannon"

in my defense, I don't go out of my way to listen to Fleetwood Mac but that's still incredibly embarrassing

Have you checked out Cheap Trick's "Rhiannon"?

Not a patch on Rainbow's "I, Rhiannon" imo

I thought it was called "Brianna" for a long time

No retreat, baby, no rhiannon

I'm gonna take you by the hand
And make you understand
Rhiannon

Werner Erhard, the creator of est training, is not a German but an American and that's not his given name

The song's close to twenty years old, but I just found out that "Zombie Nation" is the name of the band, not the song. The song is actually called "Kernkraft 400" for some stupid reason, even though "Kernkraft 400" is not spoken at any point in the song and in fact the only words in the song are "Zombie Nation." They couldn't have just called it "Zombie Nation"?

I just realized that "companion" means "person you eat bread with."

I knew about ponies and horses, but the fact that an "ox" isn't a distinct species but just a catch-all word for cattle trained to be draft animals was a total surprise to me recently.

Per the earlier discussion about 'Rhiannon', I think I thought until last year that 'River Deep, Mountain High' was Ike & Tina's cover of 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' (which doesn't even make sense chronologically). Just imagine my surprise and awe and wonder when I actually heard the song for the first time.

I just realized that "companion" means "person you eat bread with."

― been there, not done that (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, March 31, 2017 2:10 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that was in the same book I just read about etymology The Etymologican.
It has recognisable roots if you look at it closely. com pan ion.

Yeah, and since I love this kind of thing (conspiracy = people breathing together), it should have been one I'd already noticed and loved!

I forget whose observation this is, but etymology puts you in closer touch with the mot juste. It is better to speak of a dilapidated wall than a dilapidated raincoat, just as speaking of a threadbare raincoat makes more sense than speaking of a threadbare wall.

Since it's Easter I'll admit to not realizing the Mott the Hoople song title "Roll Away the Stone" was anything but a rock and roll reference until Alice Bag posted her version (with helpful graphic) on fb.

https://alicebag.bandcamp.com/track/roll-away-the-stone

rats and mice are different species????? what?????????????????????????????/

did you think a mouse was just a baby rat

mice are just domesticated rats iirc

xp yes

Mice are the ponies of the rat kingdom, iirc

i thought so

weirdly I have known since middle school that mice were mus musculus and rats were rattus rattus.

However I was in my twenties before I learned that soft drinks were so named because there's no liquor in them.

rats and mice are different species?????

I suppose if one's only point of reference is cartoons, then rats are just mice that smoke cigarettes and act like hoodlums.

yes!

this week i learned that the chorus of Dancing Queen isn't "you can dance! you can die!"

haha

rats and mice are different species????? what?????????????????????????????/

― flappy bird, Sunday, April 16, 2017 10:35 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How closely related are they?
Assume that they have a not that distant shared ancestor.
Though mutation over generations over time with something that breeds as frequently as they do and so on.
They do seem pretty static though.

down vote
True rats and mice are rodents that constitute part of the subfamily Murinae in the family Muridae. The Old World house mouse is Mus musculus, the brown rat is Rattus norvegicus, so they are members of two different genera in that family. It is estimated that they split from a common ancestor 12-24 million years ago. Just to put that in perspective, the rodent lineage (including rats and mice) and the primate lineage (apes, monkeys, humans) diverged about 80 million years ago.

So says the first Google hit.

the caribou is the north american species of reindeer

I think I was about 30 when I learned that christians, muslims, and jews all believed in the same god. I was like wtf, forget all you people. People are the worst.

Ikr. Even Shaivite Hindus and Vaishnavite Hindus can find different gods to pray to. It's sort of fun to think of Abrahamic religions as different 'sects' or 'denominations'.

That Mariska Hargitay is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield & Mickey Hargitay

Almost every sword & sorcery, sci-fi or post-apocalypse movie is also a road movie.

Canadian Tire is, in fact, a store that sells a number of items and Canadians aren't talking about buying new tires for their cars all the time

There was a thing I heard some years ago about all the monotheic Gods having started as lightning Gods. & I think that's true of old Yahweh too.
I heard while studying history at the beginning of the milennium that there was an understanding during the rise of Islam of jews and Christians being respected as people of the book so being allowed to keep their religions under occupation, whereas other religiions were more forcibly converted.& that Freedom of practising those religions was probably freer than trying to practise either islam or Judaism under Christian rule of the same era. But most European history was written by Christians for hundreds of years so the understanding passed down is probably a deal different to practise at the time.

Also that sci fi/sword & sorcery story thing. Joseph Campbell has a basic story outline that covers most tales and might be seen as a road story of a kind.

American Eagle is, in fact, a store that sells a number of items and...

Maybe more "today I learned," but the South Pole stays on New Zealand time. So even though it's daylight for six months out of the year (and night for six months), they still have to change their clocks for motherfucking Daylight Savings Time.

That it isn't Rufus (Khan) & Chaka Khan

That it isn't Rufus (Khan) & Chaka Khan

Next you will tell me it isn't Tony Orlando and Dawn Orlando.

lol

Also that sci fi/sword & sorcery story thing. Joseph Campbell has a basic story outline that covers most tales and might be seen as a road story of a kind.

You can go back a lot further than that, stories like this are canon. Look at "Journey to the West" for example which is the ancient story that Monkey Magic was based on.

BTW whenever anyone mentions tony orlando and dawn all I can think of is "Bitchin Camaro".

I think it was Campbell that consciously pointed out the boiled down outline. Not sure if anybody had done that before. He was also talking about stories that are much older but he showed the skeletal structure and meaning ascribed. I think that has passed into near common parlance so a lot of people after him are aware of the structure.

Also reminded of the there are only 7 stories thing. I think that normally ends 'in Hollywood' but think it might be much wider. & that boils things down to bare bones like where factor a effects factor b and factor c happens thusly resulting in factor d and the rest is detail or things happen in a different order. Just woke up so not thinking what the actual 7 stories are or the formulas at least.

I've known "licorice pizza" as slang for a record since I was a kid, but I did not connect that it was derived from the term 'LP' until today.

There was a chain of record stores called Licorice Pizza and it was many years after knowing about it that I realized it referred to records. Never thought about the LP thing until now, and am thinking that is a coincidence since the visual relationship is so perfect.

I've never heard that phrase until today

Me either.