Things you were shockingly old when you learned

i have definitely reached the age where i don't know what's going on (except for slade)

there are other earlier examples but i feel like the line may have been entirely crossed with 'hamilton'

Slade were a staple of the English charts for most of the 70s. Their Christmas single still gets played every Christmas, probably the best loved Xmas single there is here.

And if you think glam Slade is weird looking, check out the early skinhead phase.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/03/SladeSkinheads1969.jpg/170px-SladeSkinheads1969.jpg

hot

How winches on cars were used. I always thought they were for towing things, but could never figure out why they were mounted in the front. One explanation I came up with was that if you needed your own vehicle to be towed you'd attach it to the towing car in front of you (this suggested you'd know you car was likely to need towing). I also considered you might need to tow something very carefully, and you'd want to be able to watch it as you proceeded, so you'd go backward while pulling it.

Finally I saw the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy and there's a scene where a Land Rover gets stuck and the driver attaches it to a tree in front of him to pull himself out (to comic effect), and it clicked that it's used to get your *own* vehicle out of the mud when you're out in the wilderness by yourself. Duh.

The Slade Skinhead thing was imposed on them by the management. It was bandwagon jumping on a style that was more interested in jamaican sounds like rocksteady and very early reggae. I don't think the band went anywhere near those sounds. BUt thinking about it now you could possibly see them asa precursor to Oi.

There is a really good video of them live in the studio a couple of years later where they rock with a great deal of oomph. Way better than their teenybop image would suggest.

LOL Americans

the idea of someone on this board not knowing who Slade are is amazing to me. I guess they had no transatlantic appeal at all then?

if you wanna hear something great, listen to the live version of 'Get Down And Get With It' from Slade Alive.

Vine previously played League football for Portsmouth, Brentford, Colchester United, Luton Town, Birmingham City, Queens Park Rangers (QPR), Hull City, Milton Keynes Dons, Exeter City, Gillingham, St Johnstone, Hibernian and Greenock Morton, and non-league football for Welling United, Havant & Waterlooville, Gosport Borough (two spells), Basingstoke Town, Southall, Hayes & Yeading and Hartley Wintney.

Been around the block, it's fair to say.

LOL wrong thread. That will confuse the Americans even more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3nhHV4GiLg

essential viewing for learning about slade

silby, you are like the anti-me in this regard, and I'm sure most here would agree that that's a very fine thing to be.

I guess they had no transatlantic appeal at all then?

Cum On Feel The Noise peaked on the Hot 100 at 98.

The Quiet Riot version went to #5, based on Wikipedia. You can still hear it sometimes. "Run Runaway" went to #20.

That "bedraggled" is pronounced bee-draggled, not bed-raggled. At least that's how the lady on the radio just said it.

Imagine our American surprise finding out that the band behind "Cum on Feel the Noize" and "Mama We're All Crazee Now" looked and performed like human Muppets.

https://i.imgur.com/uHeRCb6.jpg

This is sort of cheating as I've known this song for a decade or more, but I was still much too old when I learnt about Slade's amazing cover of "Security". (Or, I think it's a proto-Slade called The 'NBtweens.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QXr8bLKfZE

Imagine our American surprise finding out that the band behind "Cum on Feel the Noize" and "Mama We're All Crazee Now" looked and performed like human Muppets.

I didn't hear Slade until way after I saw them, as a teenager thumbing through some ancient guide to rock stars that my mom bought for $0.50 at a church rummage sale. I'm pretty sure it was this pic or one from this photo session, but I just got so angry when I saw it.

https://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/rexfeatures_45599e.jpg?quality=80&strip=all

And I love the Muppets btw.

I mean, maybe they were ahead of their time. Slade could've passed for a 90 band.

https://i.imgur.com/XNRre7B.jpg

(And I do mean "90 band" - as in 1990, not the rest of the decade.)

they were one of my favorite bands of the 90 too. Go figure. idk.

That picture makes me angry mostly because of Super Yob's Thulsa Doom haircut:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/5/5b/Thulsa_Doom_%28Conan_the_Barbarian%29.png/revision/latest?cb=20160827175820

I watched the Run Runaway video for the first time in like 30 years a few months ago; I had incredibly fond memories of that song being on the radio all the time during a family road trip in 1984 but Noddy Holder's tongue movements haunt me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikMiQZF-mAY&t=143

It just went click in my middle-aged person head that "bubonic" is not merely some quirkily euphonious but meaningless name for Some Particular Plague but presumably one which involves buboes.

(And then I looked up what a bubo actually is, and it is a slightly different variety of gross fluid-filled swelling from the ones I'd had in mind, too - but this is all more than enough research on this topic for now)

Only a fraction as horrifying as the beezbonic plague.

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

how the hell do you sing like that without yrou throat exploding

That execution by firing squad is designed to identification of the person who fired the lethal shot.

*avoid identification?

I thought it was to absolve guilt. So that the would-be executioner can convince themselves that they did not fire the lethal shot?

If they were that concerned would they be on the firing squad in the first place?

Not certain there's a sign-up sheet.

Avoid, yes, sorry. For the reason fionnland says.

nickn has a pretty good point

I understand that having one of the rifles loaded with blanks is a quaint but outdated convention. The well-intentioned idea is to allow each rifleman to think he might not responsible. But in actuality an experienced person would be able to tell the difference between having fired a blank vs. a real cartridge.

I didn't think (on my belated understanding) that it was to do with blanks: the dispersal of responsibility just came from having lots of shooters and no one being quite sure if their shot alone would have been fatal.

Necessarily to do with blanks, I should have said.

Having lots of shooters (with real bullets) is to guarantee the guy ends up dead quickly.

much better to assume that even a skilled marksman might not kill you in one shot. you want at least ten guys, you're gonna get guaranteed dead

Gotta say if I had to get executed I’d want firing squad if guillotine weren’t available.

yeah it’s the only option where you get to look cool and smoke a cig right before you die

plus you get a tombstone pizza iirc

Silby:

"Both King Charles I and Queen Anne Boleyn are reported to both have showed signs of trying to speak following their beheadings (by executioners' swords, rather than by guillotine) [source: Maslin]. When he spoke out against the use of the guillotine in 1795, German researcher S.T. Sommering cited reports of decapitated heads that have ground their teeth and that the face of one decapitated person "grimaced horribly" when a physician inspecting the head poked the spinal canal with his finger [source: Sommering]."

Nooooooope

I hadn't thought about it until a local mexican food chain had "rolled taquitos" on the menu and I thought "wait, what would a non-rolled..."

taquito means, literally, "little taco"

I mean, it's the literal translation, but for some reason I never think of a taquito as a taco, let alone a little one. If someone had ever said "what does the _word" taquito" mean I'd have instantly said it

egg timers are timers for eggs, not necessarily timers shaped like eggs.

lol

ooh that's a good one

Taquito is a good one. But then etymological revelations of the English language still semi-regularly knock me on my ass.

I think of an egg timer as being a little version of an hourglass

Speaking of, I just realized that HOURglass is an inaccurate description of basically every hourglass I've ever encountered.

See? It's troublingly easy to blow my mind.

I'm struggling to imagine an egg timer shaped like an egg

[does one google]

wtf, America

we’re a very literal conglomeration of people from the diaspora