Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Thanks aldo.
Must need to hear the verses now.
& I assume the couple will either remain separated or have to find another new home now taht the cops have been brought down on their new one.
She's a liability innit?
I thought people tended to scarper in the dead of night, so what were the licensing hours? Were places open 24 hours pre WWI

Took me a while to realise this wasn’t a very deep reading of the Joni Mitchell song.

Deeper than any Joni Mitchell song.

Haha my mind went to Ian Dury.

Anyway I agree with Aldo's reading but the boozing is subtext rather than text, at least in this version of the lyric:

http://ingeb.org/songs/myoldman.html

Ian Dury, same here. Or even that silly Lou Reed song.

Wasn't sure what a cock linnet was either. & in the version the lyrics were linked to the narrator was going to pinch his bird seed.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/nature-studies-you-ve-heard-the-song-that-features-the-linnet-but-have-you-heard-the-linnet-sing-9356456.html

"The Green Linnet", now there's a song to be reckoned with.

Boozing is subtext for sure, but songs are intrinsically linked to Marie Lloyd's life at the time - having gone from the romantic (The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery), through her divorce into morally lax or even vulgar (She Sits Among The Cabbages And Peas) to easily confused (Oh! Mr Porter!) - and by the time we get to My Old Man she's frequently unable to finish shows due to 'tiredness'.

To my mind the verses make it more explicit that the husband is contriving a scheme to be rid of her.

We had to move away
'Cos the rent we couldn't pay.

Which we'd often done before, let me remark

This suggests it's far more serious than him perpetually losing the jobs he had, which would be the most common reason for running away from rent arrears - there is an ongoing drain on finances that supports the subtext.

Then we packed all we could pack
On the tailboard at the back,
Till there wasn't any room for me to ride.

Suggesting it's deliberate to overfill, or to lie about how full it is to create the circumstances. How did they manage to accumulate so much stuff if they have no money, or misjudge the size of the van if they move frequently?

I gave a helping hand

All at once, the car-man bloke
Had an accident and broke

I was cross about the loss

What with "two out" and a chat

This is the enactment of the plot. She is part of the process then the distraction happens. China is broken, there is a fight,and she doesn't see the loading while she calms down. Given this happens while the kitchen is being packed it's unlikely they do spend the time making a cup of tea and the scarequotes in this version indicate it's a euphemism for having a drink which is the start of the descent into a stupor.

Oh! I'm in such a mess.
I don't know the new address -
Don't even know the blessed neighbourhood

These three lines all have double meanings. Is she in a mess because of the confusion or the drink? (See also dillied and dallied describing both multiple stops and a staggering motion of walking.)Does she not know the address because she can't remember or because she wasn't told it? Does she literally not know what district they were moving to (adding to the deliberate act narrative) or does she just mean she can't navigate the area?

The version on youtube has "I stopped along the way to have the old half-quart, and I can't find my way home" - without it I think you're stretching there.

(I assumed the Lonnie Donegan to start with)

Yeah the wiki page gives various alternate versions, several of which are explicitly about boozing (which kind of underlines the fact that it's subtextual at most in the original).

What's 'a "two-out"'?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5hWWe-ts2s

xp

iirc it inspired Paul Simon's '50 Ways to Leave Your Lover' with an early draft lyric being "Pretend to move home, Jerome"

(i took it to be two cups of tea, like in Tea For Two)

Two out of three - cup of tee in yer cockernee

The riffing on 'Shaft' in the US politics thread just reminded me that I was well into adulthood before I realized that the lyric was not

He's a complicated man
No one understands him but his woman
(Joan Shaft)

I guess I figured it was only fair that his woman would get a shout-out by name.

I just wondered why his woman was called John!

He's called John isn't he? Are we sure about this Joan thing?

He is called John, there is no Joan or Mrs John. I remain confused as to why the backing singers chose that moment to mention his name.

they're just still excited about john shaft, wouldn't you be

kinda surprised and bummed there was never a cash-in "Ms. Shaft" film tbh

She has to accompany John everywhere and serve as his translator, because no one else can understand him.

Dr. C., there still could be. Start a Kickstarter.

Mrs Shaft Among The Jews

The riffing on 'Shaft' in the US politics thread just reminded me that I was well into adulthood before I realized that the lyric was not

He's a complicated man
No one understands him but his woman
(Joan Shaft)

I guess I figured it was only fair that his woman would get a shout-out by name.

― St. Boniface, patron saint of boner faces (Old Lunch)

I always thought it was funny that that's how they show how well she understands him, she knows his first name too!

When you find out exactly where the krayt dragon skeleton in #starwars came from ... #filmaking #disney pic.twitter.com/MB41TKYy48

— Paul Dolan (@PaulDolanArt) February 21, 2019

(I saw "One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing" in theaters in 1975. I did not see "Star Wars" until 1981.)

Yeah I remember that film, not very PC about Asians though I think.
Anti-ageist though I guess.

to stop dough sticking to your hands/the counter when making bread you don't add flour you add water

didn't realize until last week that the Mercury missions were flown with one astronaut, the Gemini with two astronauts and the Apollo with three

TIL: in ages past, people wore nightcaps not only for warmth but to protect pillowcases from greasy hair.

I didn't know that either but makes sense. What were those things people used to have on the top of chairs and sofas to do the same?

Antimacassars

Ah yep – thanks. Such a Victorian-sounding word.

I've been thinking and reading "Julie" Styne instead of Jule Styne for years

He did pronounce it Julie though

Ah, well that's slightly better. Still had him pictured as a dame.

Stanley Donen directed Saturn 3 and Blame It On Rio.

We don't talk about that.

In the 1970s, fountains were installed inside malls not just to look pretty, but to also mask crowd noise.

(Plumbing and insurance fees pretty much got them removed, and besides, not a whole lot of crowd noise inside malls these days anyway.)

I thought mercury was done with a chimp or john glenn, depending on availability?

Is a chimp really an astronaut, or payload?

to stop dough sticking to your hands/the counter when making bread you don't add flour you add water

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Friday, 22 February 2019 23:17 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalin

whaaaaaaat

I knew of this about adding oil to your hands or counter, but i guess water would work.

Things I was really way too old to have learned when I did:

1. One of my dad's grandmothers was originally from Ireland, so Dad could've qualified to get an Irish passport. I didn't learn this until my dad had been dead for a good five years. It's left me with a hilarious image in my head of my dad, who resembled a Native American version of Elvis Presley, wandering the streets of Dublin.
2. That white people call barbacoa tacos "tacos de cabeza" and are under the impression they only contain the meat from the cheeks of cows. Oh my sweet summer children, barbacoa (i.e. a common thing my family and I ate every Sunday morning after Mass while I was growing up) typically contains both cheek AND tongue meats, and the kind that isn't "all meat" often includes all manner of other proteins from the head, including the eyeball. I know this because my late dad would also buy some at our usual place for his mom and that part of his family and get the "regular" kind so my grandma could get the eyeball, which was her favorite part. Oh, and if you slow-cook tongue the way you're supposed to with barbacoa it tastes like really rich pot roast and it's only the poorly cooked tongues that are tough and chewy.
3. How to be both an Anglophile and 100% cognizant of the fact that one is an American and act accordingly.
4. That the frequent crying jags I experienced alone in my bedroom while growing up were in fact my version of panic/anxiety attacks and that my #1 issue all along has been anxiety; I thought it'd always been depression but the depression was in fact a manifestation of my lifelong anxiety issues. (Like, a vivid memory I've held onto since I was two was completely based in anxiety.)
5. I unfortunately learned only too well from my late mother to judge people instead of getting to know them for who they are, and that has tainted my interactions with too many people in the past. Mom was one of those stereotypical catty popular girls all throughout her life and would view people through her own personal prism of what was, to her, socially acceptable, even me. I've learned since then how to divest myself of those toxic thought processes and have been significantly better at interacting with others since then.

Also, I believe my mom's obituary notice cost me about $400 to publish in 2015. It was a longer one with a photo and came with the online Legacy posting/memorial (including guest book I paid a couple extra bucks to keep open permanently) and it was also posted on the funeral home's website.

Green Day's "Basket Case" video was shot in 16mm black-and-white then hand colored in a studio in India.

That the song I Will Always Love You was written by Dolly Parton and was not a Whitney Houston original.

Seems more like one for the 'unusual wiki info' thread tbh. The above isn't in the wiki, it says the bass player did the colouring in xp

Hmmm . . . I was going off an interview the director, Mark Kohr, gave to the author of this book that I recently read.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51LdDaNr16L.jpg

The "shoes on my feet, I bought em..." aspect of "Independent Women, Pt. 1" is an allusion to the spoken-word declarations from Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman."

I’m 40 and I would not be shocked in the least if I went to the grave not having learned that or the green day video thing.

I figured it had been colorized, just not by ... Mike Dirnt.