Things you were shockingly old when you learned

they do exist all over the U.S., not in desert areas afaik. not as recognizable/known as poison ivy. i got stung by it not knowing what it was when i was doing similar, touching unfamiliar plants on a roadside like an idiot.

xpost Yeah, I learned not too long ago that poison ivy is primarily a North American phenomenon.

Seems nettles were introduced to North America. I'm not sure if that was deliberate or not.

You can make booze from them I suppose.

Oh, here's a late-in-life poison ivy thing I learned a few years back: the plants can still give you a rash in the fall/winter, even after they've lost their leaves and are hard to recognize!

watch out for the hairy vines

Now I’m terrified of poison ivy. Nettle rash is quite tame by comparison, passing very quickly.

Just reading up on 'yinz' which is, of course, exactly the same as the 'youse' I grew up with.

... the lack of an equivalent term being a major deficiency in standard English.

The refusal of standard English to bend on this point is so stupid. Like, there are people who trot out all sorts of stupid rules that are supposedly about being precise (less/fewer etc) yet balk at the idea of actually using a second personal plural that would actually avoid real-world ambiguity. Though: a) there’s probably more ambiguity created by the use of you to mean one (“No, not you you, I just mean people”) b) I’m a fine one to talk as it’d be too cringe if I started saying youse or y’all.

I've been using y'all for my entire life, throughout uni and grad school, and continue to use it when I teach. Standard English is for shit.

Also, nettle tea is tasty. Doesn't grow below about 4500' from my recollection, we used to collect it when I lived at around 4000'.

I heard that there was a native American tradition of whipping yourself with stinging nettles to help keep you going when you were running.

Also read Ecological Imperialism which talks about how any human travel had the tendency to take unconscious passengers with them both flora and fauna. Usually as seeds or vermin. Certainly in the early European incursions to the Americas but the author talked about much earlier travel too.

don't get me started on the bad and hated tree of heaven

Now fireflies, those are things you generally don't see how west (I learned late in life). Also something of a novelty to my Aussie family.


any more of a novelty than they are to kids who live in similar population density in the US? there are a couple dozen species of fireflies in Australia, though some may have been wiped out in the bushfires this year

okay, well clearly i'm wrong. or my b.o.l. has lived a particularly sheltered existence

xpost I can't say. There are fireflies all over the place here and everywhere I've lived in the US.

... the lack of an equivalent term being a major deficiency in standard English.

Just wait until you dive into "jawn."

in Australia I've not seen fireflies in cities or suburban front yards, only in woods & by creeks (and in caves, for glow worms).

Never saw fireflies in California, Josh. When this Philly jawn returned home to his roots, he was delighted to have them back in his life.

I caught a few webinars on light pollution a few weeks ago and one thing they were bewailing was the end of the firefly as a partial result of excess light being in the habitats they used to frequent.

Fireflies routinely appeared in my inner-suburban front yard as a child on the US east coast, I have never seen a firefly in Seattle I don’t think.

East coast has poison ivy and fireflies

West coast has poison oak and wildfires

I was surprised by how many fireflies I saw this summer. Usually there are a handful of nights each summer where I see 8-10 fireflies buzzing around our yard, but this summer it was essentially every night for weeks on end.

Yeah, as a little kid I lived in California and don't remember the fireflies there. Just looking it up now, apparently there are in fact fireflies west of the Mississippi, and specifically on the west coast, they just have a very very dim glow and are hard to see.

When I was a child in Missouri there were fireflies. Not sure the range. I do know that my Oregonian friends were amazed and delighted upon visiting and seeing them for the first time.

TIL that europe has decided to stick to daylight savings time, so next year the clocks will spring forward in march but won't fall back in the autumn

however, whether the uk does this is another matter, given that we've left the eu. but the gov website, modified yesterday, suggests that we'll continue for the next 3 years at least.

https://www.gov.uk/when-do-the-clocks-change

(without DSL it'll start getting light at 3:30am in london. but sticking on DSL will mean that greenwich isn't on greenwich mean time...)

wait what

ah, ok, there is some element of choice:

https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/the-news-explained/daylight-saving-time-greenwich-mean-clocks-back-hour-forward/

"Is this the last time the clocks go back?

On March 26, 2019, the European Parliament voted to stop changing the clocks in the EU.

As a result, the clock change in March 2021 will be the last one for EU countries that decide to permanently keep their summer time.

Member states that prefer to keep their standard time will change the clocks for the last time in October 2021."

so some will stick on summer time and some will stick on non-summertime but it sounds like they'll all stick with one or the other and ditch the clock changing from then on.

lol whut

so you might have spain on one, and france on the other? no way

Spain shouldn't really be on the same time zone as France but that's another matter

yeah i guess it's no more arbitrary than the UK being an hour different from spain

Franco changed Spain from GMT to Central European Time in 1940 and it was never changed back. I suppose France is in the same boat there - in terms of difference between clock time and solar time - and should maybe also be using GMT also.

so you might have spain on one, and france on the other? no way

you might have forgotten the US and Canada's melange of timezones, but let me introduce you to Australia, which in summer has six different time zones, one of which is half an hour off from its neighbours, one state which never goes onto DST, one territory that also never does, and a weird pocket within one state that is forty-five minutes off the hour

Let us not speak of Indiana

My terrible idea: set the whole world to a single time zone and it's either dark at 2pm or it isn't dealwithit.gif

I've had this idea before. universal time. it's the same time everywhere all the time and you just get used to what time it is where you are. so you're like 'damn I'm up late, it's 4pm" and you're just used to it

Swatch tried that in 1998, without overwhelming success. It may not have helped that they made it decimal and called it "Internet Time".

That scene in the TZ episode "To Serve Man" when the reporter (I think) is on the ship and he demands "What time is it on earth?" will finally make sense.

GMT still works!

"In an oral history, Fred Silverman said he landed on the name Scooby-Doo after hearing Frank Sinatra singing the familiar riff from his 1966 hit “Strangers in the Night.”: do-be-do-be-do."

Strangers in the night, where are you?
We've got some glances to exchange now

That Nick Gilder and Bryan Adams were in a band together?!?

Oh weird, I just noticed the Scooby-Doo trivia a few posts up, which harkens back to my recent discovery that this song pre-dates the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdbI7fuE_x0

W.E.B du Bois had a more unsung brother called Schubert so Webby doo bwa hada brother who close friends called Shooby doo bwa.
LIttle known fact like

Melanie Griffith was married to Antonio Banderas, and *twice* to Don Johnson, and Dakota Johnson is their kid! Anyone following basic tabloid news would know this but these four celebrities have never been filed anywhere near each other in my brain. I did at least know Griffith was Tippi Hedren's daughter, thanks to Roar.

Are you inside my brain? I went looking up Melanie Griffith's family the day before yesterday (couldn't remember which out of her and Goldie Hawn had which parents/children)

melanie griffith, mauled by a lion because her mom was crazy.

Now I’m terrified of poison ivy. Nettle rash is quite tame by comparison, passing very quickly.

This is true, but don't go groping random plants on a walk in the UK either, because giant hogweed can fuck you up. https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2019/06/giant-hogweed-facts/

(It grows along the riverbanks here and gets pretty tall and close to the path in summer, as do the nettles - though looking at the above page I'm wondering if the stuff I've seen might be common hogweed and not giant after all, but I'm still going to try not to touch it)

Turn and run
Nothing can stop them
Around every river and canal their power is growing
Stamp them out
We must destroy them
They infiltrate each city with their thick dark warning odor
They are invincible
They seem immune to all our herbicidal battering

wow, kinder! freaky. my partner and i just watched Something Wild and i looked up her Wiki.