Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Despite Portishead being one of my most listened-to bands of my adult life, I only just became aware that Beth Gibbons had a solo album in 2002

I love that album

I enjoyed it on first listen last night, yeah

I listened to that so much at the time, it still holds up

I love it but it isn't a solo album

No no I know, but still

Paul Webb, right. Talk Talk guy

when I was a teenager "1 Fugazi" was written on show flyers and meant $5

not to leave my tablet on the plane

:/

when they've done the controlled explosion I'm sure they'll send you the bits

Um, how is it possible that I've only just this morning realized that an asterisk has five points, not six? This feels like some 'Berenstein/Berenstain'-esque revisionist history shit tbrr.

citation needed

wikipedia has 5-pointed in the text but 6-pointed in the big box-out on the right. so i think it's a typeface thing, the way 'a's can be different in different typefaces.

6 in Georgia, Times New Roman, Garamond, Verdana. 5 in Helvetica, Arial, Courier, Comic Sans.

actually, if i'd gotten further than the picture

"In English, an asterisk is usually five-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces [citation needed]"

mine are normally 5-pointed when i'm hand-writing stuff because you can draw one without lifting the pen from the paper

Okay, so I'm only partially crazy, then. Whew.

Well, I was at least shockingly old when I realized that asterisks have a varying number of points.

Pompey is pronounced Pom-pi and not Pom-pay.

Is that Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus or Portsmouth?

'Twas only a few years ago I found out that many 3 or 4-way junctions here in the UK have traffic lights where you need to press the crossing button in order to activate a pedestrian crossing cycle. Before that I'd just stand there bemused as the green man remained resolutely unlit.

What FBPE stands for. Like a minute ago. And I almost searched for FPBE. In fact I've just had to check again whether it is FBPE or FPBE.

Pompey is pronounced Pom-pi and not Pom-pay.

You sure about that?

https://forvo.com/word/pompei/#it

but... Pompey though

Depends on the Pompey.

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

Oh, right. Had no idea.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/cute-small-pomeranian-dog-peeing-park-urinating-105437652.jpg

Also, mispronounced in English...

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

I was all set to finally add “why Portsmouth has that inexplicably annoying nickname Pompey" to this thread and then I found out no one really knows. The first explanation here sounds totally fucking made-up though:

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2010,00.html

"Jacob" is the latin cognate of the name "James." I was trying to figure out why it was Jacobean Era, when James was the guy. I knew in Spanish it's Jaime, or Diego related to Iago? So I feel like I was so close for so long, but somehow failed thrive in onomastics.

That Windsor Safari Park doesn't exist any more and Legoland is in the same place.

Beth Gibbons also worked with Paul Webb on the first O-Rang album, which came out before (or perhaps just after) Dummy.

& O-rang were Talk Talk minus Mark Hollis or something similar.

Apart from the unofficial fourth member (IE producer and co-writer) of Talk Talk, Tim Friese-Greene, who went on to record as... Heligoland!

I'm not a car person so maybe i just never really thought about it before but... car tyres don't have inner tubes!

The complexity of getting tubeless bike tires to work at all, and keep em orderly long term, has increased my respect immensely. To amazement really. They just basically work all the fucking time and keep going and holy fuck what a great way to wreck a planet.

xp they used to! Up until the 50s, I think.

i'm obviously turning into more of an old-timer than i thought

xp ha hunt3r, no sealant in them either - really fucking weird imo

Haha, this is something I struggled to wrap my head around this, coming from a family of bike enthusiasts.

I did not know that about Windsor safari park

i jokingly refer to typical non-UST tubeless bike tires as "incredibly flat resistant. also, incredibly inflation resistant," though with a compressor, not too bad. (i've never used UST so i don't know its inflation profile).

there are people who are from a major north american city who don't know how to pronounce guillermo (as in del toro)

THings I must have mainly heard in hindsight but have just heard over the last week what the starting points were.
Hilary Clinton's 3 million majority apparently didn't emerge until the vote was fully counted a while after the election was declared. Steve Kornackie was comparing a potential outcome fo Tuesday to it. California being so close that every vote gets counted afterwards with full tally only being announced in December.

Also Colin Kaepernick first doing his protest in August 2016, way before the last election. Not sure what I was reading a few days ago that had that come out. I think I was first aware of it when trump was making a big deal of things last year.

there are people who are from a major north american city who don't know how to pronounce guillermo (as in del toro)

Hispanic culture isn't equally prevalent everywhere in NA.

Not to mention pronunciation fluctuates depending on the variety of Spanish.

Not sure how/why you would pronounce it gwai-lermo, no spanish speaker pronounces it like that

That's generally an honest mistake but then again no one pronounces my first name properly and I don't expect them to either because we can't know everything about foreign cultures. I only take issue with those who don't give a fuck when I tell them the correct pronunciation, which doesn't happen very often. Likewise, I don't think most North Americans choose to gleefully mispronounce 'Guillermo'.

Context matters too. If you're an anglophone living in Montreal and you don't make the slightest effort to correctly pronounce francophone names, you're being a dick. Outside of French-speaking areas, though, there's no sense in getting bent out of shape over it, it's not necessarily Quebec bashing (although it can be).

Likewise, if you're not Hispanic but live next to a sizeable Hispanic community in the US and couldn't care less about how 'those people' pronounce their names, you're a piece of shit. But history isn't the same everywhere.

The only reason I (think I) know how to pronounce Gullermo correctly is because of broadcast journalists who I trust pronouncing it in reference to Del Toro.