Things you were shockingly old when you learned

No way

Terry JOnes tv shows on the Medieval age were pretty good. I think he hgoes into teh problems with the Crusades to good degree.
I've heard taht a lot of teh Xian heroes were mercenaries who spent time fighting for the muslim side too.

I'm enjoying teh Media-Eval podcast looking at media representations of medieval topics. They spent a long time rubbishing the story of the El Cid movie one week . show can be like 2 hours long plus.

That Americans can a) vote in person weeks in advance of election day, and b) have to stand in line for hours on end to do so. Or is this just a modern development?

The former is new and the latter is old

Michael Caine fought in the Korean War

Not a lot of people know that.

That Paul Robeson was a professional football player for a couple of years in the newly formed NFL in the early 20s while attending Columbia Law School. He really could do everything.

He just kept rollin' along

That Americans can a) vote in person weeks in advance of election day, and b) have to stand in line for hours on end to do so. Or is this just a modern development?

The whole system and its variability across states is baffling - presumably down to multiple efforts at 'improvements' alongside an agenda to disenfranchise minority groups.

UK is no exemplar of how to organise shit and I appreciate the geography and scale differences but we seem to muddle through getting tens of millions of people to tick a box in a single day with not too much fuss.
US seems to make it really hard for itself, maybe deliberately.

I'm also surprised they release daily early voting stats by party adfiliation in advance of results which is a big no in most other countries.

its completely deliberate

I do think the idea of spreading an election out over a week or two makes sense, especially in a country as large as the US. Theoretically it might also mean less chance of some bullshit last-minute promise by the incumbent party to sway the floating voters. Anyway, this is probably all for one of the numerous US politics threads instead of here.

Yeah, I know if varies state by state and there are issues with queues, but the principle of allowing early voting is good one, it seems to me, and quite a surprise in a country that often goes out of its way to make it hard to vote.

Not many other countries seem to have taken this positive step, though possibly that's because mail-in voting is better implemented.

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

Sally Field was teh tv Gidget. I was just looking up where she started and that seems to be her first big role or at least one of tehm.

I was thinking it was her taht made Can She Bake A Cherry pie back in like 68 and taht's Karen Black.

Also that Gidget started with Sandra Dee as a one off film. I know that Sandra Dee was viewed as sqaeaky clean from having seen Grease I now know she turned up in Frasier years later which I don't think I've come across before.

A quote from Sally Field about public perception turned up inn a webinar I was on a few days ago. Slipped my mind she had been Forest Gump's mum in the film when people couldn't place her.

Flying Nun as well.

I was vaguely aware that the disconnect of Roman month names (September being the ninth month rather than seventh, etc.) had to do with Julius Caesar and Augustus.

But not in the way that I'd been told.

It wasn't so much that July and August were added (nudging the other months out of sequence). Rather, the Roman year began in March, so September was seventh, October was the eighth, etc.

That said, it's also true that there were only 10 months in the Roman calendar.

That was fixed by adding two months, yes - but the months that were added were January and February, NOT July and August. July and August were existing months that got renamed.

good stuff

This is a gold mine:

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

i never realized that either, and now it makes perfect sense! (sept/oct/nov/dec = 9/10/11/12)

Teri Garr was in 5 Elvis movies:

Fun In Acapulco, 1963
Kissin' Cousins, 1964
Viva Las Vegas, 1964
Roustabout, 1964
Clambake, 1967

a few times every year during october i catch myself writing the date as 8-x-20xx because the oct- prefix momentarily confuses me

xps

what most people don't understand is that january and february were named after jann wenner and diane ferruary

Karl is quite right.

Further, July was named after Miranda July.

August was named after August Busch Jr., who owned the St. Louis Cardinals and the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

it was actually named after Augustus, not sure you realized that

xxxp Teri Garr was also one of the dancers at the TAMI show

lol wait YMP is your contention that the Romans actually used a 10-month calendar for awhile, before realising the seasons didn’t line up? That seems unlikely??

wait until you hear about kalends, ides and nones

Tracer - yes and no. Yes, they started out with a 10-month 304-day calendar and then went to a 355-day calendar.

But they weren't idiots; they knew it would get out of synch. Tgere were two ways of dealing with the problem. For a time, winter days just didn't belong to a month. The days happened, there just wasn't a tidy name for them. Secondly, they could and did add extra days every now and then (intercalation) just as we do in leap years.

For a time, winter days just didn't belong to a month

big mood #2020

lol yes. YMP that is wild.

Highly recommend adding The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning to your reference library, as it's absolutely packed to the brim with 15 Things You Never Knew About the Year (And That's Okay) (And Here's Why)!

Is everyone ok with making 2020 an uncountable time, and then starting a new era after trump goes away? It will involve some Y2K—style updates to computers, but other than that we should be set

Old Lunch is that a peel-off desktop calendar? Like the Far Side? Because damn, that’s reminding me that I need to pick up one of those Far Side peel off calendars.

brb

No, it's an actual book! Although Oxford really missed a trick by not releasing a page-a-day calendar version of the book.

Does anyone have the phone number for Oxford?

I had it, but I wrote it down on the back of one of those peel off calendar pages and recycled it. Believe it was on the back of a July page, if that helps!

anno Dummy

*yells in the direction of Oxford, from the front porch*

i just learned that michael keaton is beetlejuice.

holy shit

no you did not

He only played him in the biopic, he's not the real Beetlejuice

youve said it twice now thread dont say it again

https://i.imgur.com/Klpo29d.jpg

Speaking of Beetlejuice.. Sylvia Sidney.

i...

noooooooooooooooooooooo you unbanned him by saying his name 3 times HE WAS SO OFFENSIVE

https://i.imgur.com/Q3Zb54F.jpg

hahahahaha

and now, clearly i know that's michael keaton. who else could that be? why did i never wonder who the actor was? he does a great job, he's fucking michael keaton! but i just thought "yeah, whoever that is, he's pretty good"

wait wait wait

that you can hold the spacebar down on an iPhone to move the cursor?????!

Lol no way

and it is in fact the best way to move the cursor??