Things you were shockingly old when you learned

I always thought "kinder" implied that each post was like a little surprise!

― pplains

For you to choke on!

When you spell out "ghoti" in Greek doesn't it spell Jesus?

i knew a 25 year old working in a steakhouse that asked customers if they wanted a "lib" of steak

I was once offered "Mein Strown" (Minestrone) soup at a restaurant.

That Woody Allen starred in a 1976 film called The Front.

https://i.imgur.com/bVq3xYQ.jpg

Popped up on Amazon Prime and I thought I'd slipped into a parallel universe.

You've never seen it or heard of it? It's been on telly quite a few times over the years.

Never heard of it

It was his attempt at being a serious actor.

The Front was actually the first 'Woody Allen movie' I ever saw since it was on TV.

The name of the defunct British frozen food retailer Bejam was an acronym for Brian, Eric, John And Millie, the family members who were the company directors.

Pavlov’s dogs were eaten during the siege of Leningrad.

That rings a bell.

(sorry)

the unwritten famine rules are: no longpiggery until there has been no confirmed barking or meowing for at least a few days.

The name Lenin was an alias. His real name was Ulyanov.

That is pretty shocking.

quite a few of the top Bolsheviks adopted a nom de guerre to make themselves sound a bit more rad!

the o/g shitposters iirc

Thought it was a security thing too. The one surprised me was that Willy Brandt was a pseudonym - and that was definitely to keep out of the clutches of the Nazis.

speaking of Bolsheviks i learned the other day that it means "majority" and Mensheviks means "minority", the names imposed by Lenin after he'd won a vote even though he didn't really have a majority. something very modern feeling about rebranding like that.

an interesting comparison is how accomplished the Tsarist secret police were at penetrating revolutionary activists compared with how shit they were at making them kowtow to the state and beating the resistance out of them. Like Stalin reminisces about his time in Siberian exile like it was a scout camp and a positive formative period of his life, he had access to a decent library was going on hunting and fishing adventures, it sounded like going on a slightly austere arctic center parcs break next to the gulags of the Soviet era.

ha I was about to post that I was 50 years old before I realised that there were TWO Lou Reeds on the cover of New York and then I checked to be sure and THEY'RE ALL LOU REED WTF

Is one of the Lou Reeds in blackface

that is a key question but I think we're good
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81XV9CoyCoL._SL1425_.jpg

Did he ever do I want to be black live though

Boy, did he ever.

Second track on Take No Prisoners

N-word and all.

And yet an image search for Lou Reed blackface comes up empty. What a disappointment

He did tell one journalist at the time that his next album would feature him in blackface holding a watermelon on the cover - subtle as ever.

ha I was about to post that I was 50 years old before I realised that there were TWO Lou Reeds on the cover of New York and then I checked to be sure and THEY'RE ALL LOU REED WTF

― assert (MatthewK), Monday, June 15, 2020 11:56 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

yo this fucked me up

what i came here to post was that i had always thought the NAS line "sleep is the cousin of death" was (a paraphrase of) shakespeare.

then there was a poll on the best lyrics from that tune and i did some googling and i couldn't find anything and thought maybe he just made it up ?

well, wrong again. turns out it goes way back to:

the Greek gods Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) who, in the Greek mythology, were brothers

as depicted in this 1874 john william waterhouse paining

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Waterhouse-sleep_and_his_half-brother_death-1874.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_his_Half-brother_Death

and also, closer to the NAS lyric, in this line of verse from 16th cent poet thomas sacksville, the earl of dorset:

By him lay heavy Sleep, the cousin of Death

so that's that, then.

You may also have been thinking of the Shelley line, "How wonderful is Death,/ Death and his brother Sleep!"

There's 'sleep, death's counterfeit' in Macbeth.

oh those are both good, and more likely to have caught my ear.

i wonder, though, had the "sleep / death" thing been floating around in the vernacular ? i can imagine it having neo-protestant moral implications re: laziness / productivity

aye, there's the rub

Estragon is French for tarragon

Good one.

Natalie Wood was Russian American - daughter of Russian immigrants, real name Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko - though I suppose I hadn't really thought about her ethnicity before.

well she weren't Puerto Rican that's for darn sure.

what does that even mean

A reference to Maria in West Side Story I’m guessing.

yeah mortified that that might not be obvious

lol my bad!

fuckin musicals kill me (and i've even seen that one!)

lol

The acknowledgment thing at the beginning of US zoom meetings, so presumably physical ones, where the chairman/main speaker acknowledges the native American tribe whose land they are on and where teh physical meeting would be taking place is also being done vby some i Australia.
Was wondering how long taht had been going on in terms of the US since I only came across it when dropping in on talks over there. Seems to be something taht is being done at the start of all at least leftist talks, not sure if it is universal.Also not sure what percenatge of people are doing it in Australia but it was being done at teh talk i listened to this morning.

MNow wondering if it is a new thing and if it is being done elsewhere. THough not sure where has teh same kind of history with its indigenous population that is still within recognition of who that indigenous population is.
Are there leftists doing it in Israel?
& is it a thing in South Africa or anything?

It's been done in Canada for a while, even by the PM. Idk how to embed Youtube videos but this p much sums up how I feel about it:
https://youtu.be/xlG17C19nYo

I have actually never seen it in the US.

I moved to Canada in 2014 and heard my first territorial acknowledgment shortly thereafter. I had never heard one in the US before then, but I tend to see the DAPL protests in 2016 as a turning point for Indigenous rights/issues finally getting some attention in the US, and I've since heard/seen it a few times there. It's de rigueur in Canada now to an at times perfunctory extent (for example, I don't know how meaningful adding it to your automatically generated email signature is), though I am pretty ensconced in academia

lol that Baroness von Sketch video is excellent, never seen that one