Things you were shockingly old when you learned

It kinda just occurred to me that in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's quest to get home takes on extra poignancy because in the frame story, she's living with her aunt and uncle. What happened to her parents is unclear.

(It seems like a kind of dumb phenomenon tbh?)

Same goes for the Baader-Meinhof effect, which is doubly irritating when you're familiar with the tale of the Red Army Faction. Kind of like being fluent in German and watching Hitler's Downfall memes.

I just learned what that is now too (the 'effect', not the Baader-Meinhof gang, which I did know about ofc.) That just seems like a new term for a common psychological phenomenon, though, right? Is anyone claiming that the recency illusion is evidence of something of greater significance? Mandela Effect people seem to think that it means something that a bunch of them made the same dumb mistake, that this is possibly even evidence of parallel universes.

Mandela Effect truthers are one of the stupider species of crazy, it’s not just that they’ve constructed a wacky sci-fi narrative just to avoid admitting their own fallibility but the reality-shattering plot is constructed almost exclusively of banal, inconsequential pop culture garbage. These morons are going all Keanu whoa at commonly misquoted movie lines and children’s authors with slight variant spellings on their surnames, funnily enough the chilling goings-on at cern haven’t affected anything that actually matters

The exception to that obviously is the paradigmatic case, which is even more annoying if anything cause it’s just Americans stubbornly clinging to their racism and myopia. The ppl who “remember” Mandela dying in the 80s never come across as being really on the ball when it comes to international events (or anything else lol)

Is there a database anywhere where you can list all your dumb mistakes and see if anyone else thought them too, so they can be Offically Mandela Effect? e.g I was convinced Patricia Routledge had died some time before she had

^^ I just wrote that and then checked and she hasn't even died lol

There’s a subreddit dedicated to cataloguing them, you can post the thing you misremembered and then someone who earnestly believes that a different black celebrity than they thought starring in a shitty movie is a sign of the end times will be like “that’s not a real ME you idiot, you’re just wrong”

They should've dubbed it the Shazaam effect instead.

Yeah, I mentioned the paradigmatic case on the IA thread:

Like, a bunch of non-South Africans mixing up Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko is not a supernatural phenomenon.

Or the berenstain effect, I feel like that’s the most famous one still xp

William Shakespeare's extant handwritten signatures are another obvious instance of time travel:

Willm Shakp
William Shaksper
Wm Shakspe
William Shakspere
Willm Shakspere
William Shakspeare

That only four companies account for the manufacture of truck cabs for virtually all semis on US highways, and only one, Volvo, also makes cars.

This may be a less than common piece of knowledge, but what shocked me was how little attention I've paid until recently to the nameplates of the countless 18-wheeler beasts I encounter while driving, other than the attention required to avoid getting crushed by them. (By the trucks, not their nameplates.)

I should perpetuate the Shazaam Effect by saying our next-door neighbor drove a Mack Roda sedan back in the late 70s, but I haven't seen one since.

John McEnroe has a stepdaughter whose father is Richard Hell!

the Everly Brothers are not brothers

i will never be old enough to learn that

Nor were the walker brothers

Please don’t break my heart re Ed and Tom Chemical

Patty Smyth! xpost

The confusingly named Patty Smyth, indeed.

the opening sentences of her wikipedia entry are weirdly and thus amusingly written:

Patricia Smyth (born June 26, 1957) is an American singer and songwriter. She first came into national attention in the band: Scandal. She went on to record and perform on her own. Her distinctive voice and New Wave image gained broad exposure through video recordings aired on cable music video channels such as MTV.

In what way are two male siblings born to the same parents not Brothers. I think the Everly brothers name describes the referent quite well.

Sure, and I suppose Mr and Mrs Rigtheous are proud of their two boys?

The Warrior is very easy to recall in multiple current situations.

I was a minorly obsessed with R. Hell in college so I knew of Smyth. I randomly got him to agree to design a tshirt for my radio station's fundraiser and it was memorable. He said he liked my voice and that fed me for years. I do not like McEnroe. Boomers. so weird.

:p

She left Richard for a much younger man obv.

Yeah, Everlys thing has to be a weird joke, I'm guessing?

Smyth was approached by Eddie Van Halen in 1985 to replace David Lee Roth in VH. She turned them down in part because "those guys were drunk and fighting all the time."

So she married a New York Irishman instead.

"patti 'sonyc' smith" was right there

Story I heard with the Everlys was that Don the older one didn't like being treated as a twin of his younger brother Phil. So it became one of several things contributing to the resentment between the 2 that stopped them talking for several years.
There's only about 2 years between them but I heard it rankled.

The rainbow discussion upthread reminded me of a realization I had earlier this year, of the enormity of Noah's flood. God wiping out all life on earth, every grandma and newborn baby, every dog, all the kittens and cattle and mice dying horribly, having to watch each other struggle and choke with no hope of being saved. Millions of people, trillions of creatures. It's kind of an atrocity which I'd only ever thought of in the context of a cutesy Bible tale; your little wooden ark, the pairs of stuffed animals you tuck safely inside, wise old Noah with his fluffy beard. But everyone and everything else on the planet died screaming, what the fuck? How did I not put that together sooner?

don't worry, God promised not to let it happen again

seems like an awesome god idk

mention of noah reminds me of THIS, which belongs in this thread even if i learned it a couple of years ago (i was shockingly old a couple of years ago):

Genesis 7

1: And the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
2: Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3: Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

well that's just unrealistic

i mean it's like they were lying in bible classes when i was a kid ABOUT WHAT'S ACTUALLY IN THE BIBLE

YOU JUST CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

The animals went in seven by seven
Hoorah! Hoorah!
The animals went in seven by seven
Hoorah! Hoorah!

The animals went in seven by seven
The little pig thought he was going to heaven
And they all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

(little pig v porrly briefed even in this the truthtelling verse -- tho of course he is an unclean animal)

i mean it's like they were lying in bible classes when i was a kid ABOUT WHAT'S ACTUALLY IN THE BIBLE

I asked Sunday School teachers, and later the minister at my confirmation hearings, about things in the bible, and they didn't know they were in there

YOU HAD ONE JOB

And they'll know we are Christians
Cos we're dumb

iswydt

xpoat

Version we used to sing was

The animals went in 2 by 2
The elephant and the kangaroo
And they all went marching down the drain down the lane.

YOU HAD ONE JOB

imo they effectively did their job of showing me young that even genuinely well-meaning religious teachers were absolutely bullshitting it & therefore all speakers on religion should be disregarded

FFS some american evangelicals non-ironically describe Jesus as blonde and blue eyed, so.

seven pairs of each beast could still go in two by two y'know.

Hermaphrodite is a compound name taken from the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. Character with both male and female genitals after he was melded with naiad Salmacis.

The two first letters in ISO three-letter international currency codes are the countries' ISO two-letter country codes, also used for top-level domain names and such. Should have been obvious, I guess, but a few distractions (the US not using the .us domain name, the Russian ruble having the code RUB) have kept me from noticing.

well your post made me go look something up and apparently the UK's country codes are GB and GBR, with "UK" reserved from the set of available 2-character codes so nobody else can use it. Contrariwise the .gb TLD is reserved but almost completely disused in deference to .uk

Oh yeah, exactly, that's another one of the high-profile apparent counterexamples that hides the general pattern.

God wiping out all life on earth

O rly? Fish were pretty chill about it, from what I heard.

Fish were like "Cool. More water. Thanks, God!"