Things you were shockingly old when you learned

lol

That Paul Simon released his first solo album in 1965, The Paul Simon Songbook, with solo versions of many S&G songs.

you know, i've known that for ages, flipped past copies in the bins from time to time, but it's never actually sunk into my brain as an actual piece of information about his career/discography, nor have i ever felt any spark of interest in checking it out. but maybe it's good? i could imagine it being at least okay?

That gargoyles are essentially water spouts, there solely to divert rainwater away from the buildings that house them. Similar sculptures of purely ornamental purpose are called grotesques or chimeras and aren't gargoyles at all. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Also from the old French meaning throat - as in they function as the end of gutters, and the water passes out through their mouths.

does gargle have related etymology then?

Matt needs to make notredamus his displayName.

The chorus of "All Star" by Smash Mouth incorporates the chord progression from the James Bond theme

(learned this from a Switched-on Pop podcast)

somebody once told me
this thread was gonna roll me

does gargle have related etymology then?

Lexico (~Oxford) online on "gargoyle":

Middle English from Old French gargouille ‘throat’, also ‘gargoyle’ (because of the water passing through the throat and mouth of the figure); related to Greek gargarizein ‘to gargle’ (imitating the sounds made in the throat).

So, yes, absolutely.

Also iirc gorge (throat) has a connection to the origin of the English word "gorgeous."

"Orange Pekoe” listed on black tea labels does not indicate a flavor, instead this is used to indicate the size of the leaves. The term Orange Pekoe is now in use by some retailers to describe any generic type of medium grade and size black tea.

I only learned this weekend that hens lay eggs every single day (in the absence of a rooster presumably). I find that astonishing!

uhh sure some breeds are meant to max out at 300+ eggs per year but my layers have rarely hit 7 in a week. not to mention their winter break which can last months without artificial lighting etc

I recently learned that pigs (sows) have varying numbers of teats/nipples, with something like 10 being the average, and the more teats they have, the bigger their litter (though the number of piglets does not necessarily correlate exactly to their number of teats).

the bigger the litter, the multiple teat-ers

That Paul Simon released his first solo album in 1965, The Paul Simon Songbook, with solo versions of many S&G songs.

Today I read this post and then learned, independently (through reading a booklet from one of the Dylan bootleg series releases in fact), that S+G split up in 1963 (before they were even called S+G), and split again as S+G in 1964 (after getting back together to launch a failed bid to capitalize on the folk revival), and after that only reconvened in 1965 when Dylan's producer overdubbed a band onto the Sound of Silence tapes and it became a hit.

jfc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898

can't believe i hadn't known about this til now :(

Didn't know about that until I read a (ridiculously thorough) Michael Jordan biography recently

Hyacinth can be a man's name, cf. Spanish (Jacinto) and Italian (Giacinto).

Didn't even know that was a name for people

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000112939909/d01159b05679495e60ee021c6345f4ae_400x400.jpeg

I was managing EFL teachers in China in 2015, there were five Chinese, three British and two Americans - the two Americans were an African-American woman from Louisiana and an African-American man from New York. They immediately bonded over a shared love of ... Keeping Up Appearances, a TV programme which two out of the three UK teachers had never even heard of (the third thought he might have seen an episode, once)

Keeping Up Appearances is one of only like 3 or 4 British shows I was aware of as an American kid. It was on public television here constantly. I don't know why.

Along with Are You Being Served and the one with Judi Dench in it

Oh lol, I totally swapped KUA and AYBS in my mind, it's all a blur

I thought the show was if anything a bit racist. It's about the snobbish pretensions of a lower middle class woman who aspires to be posh.
Had few coloured people in and then treated those who did appear not very well.
But found out that European friends of mine liked the show. So maybe i was missing something . I just couldn't get past teh pathos which I couldn't really deal with at the time.
Do wonder what people from outside the UK class system did think of it or caught in it.

Lead character is patricia Routledge as somebody Bucket which she pronounces as though its origins are french.

Patricia Routledge is a great actress and I love Clive Swift.

In the 90's public television showed "Britcoms" on Fri nights, the shows were variously Open All Hours and The Young Ones (early in the decade) and the Vicar of Dibley, Chef, Red Dwarf , The Brittas Empire, One Foot in the Grave, As Time Goes By and KUA, with AYBS as the one constant.

KUA replaced AYBS as the perennial public tv Britcom sometime in the 00's, and we're now down to KUA and Yes, Prime Minister with Judi Dench relegated to Sunday nights.

Americans only know Lenny Henry as the irascible chef, not at all as the jolly gameshow host.

Apart from KUA, I've only ever seen Routledge in To Sir With Love.

We also had Father Ted in the mix at one time, and probably also Fawlty Towers. Those seem to be the most popular British sitcoms on DVD here.

Oh, and Black Adder.

Routledge also in Talking Heads, but I don't know much about the rest of her career.

However, the long-suffering Richard (Clive Swift) pops up in loads of amazing Play For Today/Ghost Stories For Christmas type things, and the film Death Line. It always makes me happy to see him turn up for some reason, even though I hated KUA.

...and 'The Last of the Summer Wine'.

So we've had lots, but not necessarily the better ones (no 'Only Fools and Horses' for example) and most of them short lived apart from KUA and AYBS.

Yeah, I've seen Clive Swift in a bunch of things xp

KUA is an endurance test for sure, but I think that's kind of the point.

> Americans only know Lenny Henry as the irascible chef, not at all as the jolly gameshow host.

jolly gameshow host?

Had no idea Lenny Henry was known as a jolly gameshow host anywhere.

oh xp

I don't think Lenny Henry has been jolly - as a gameshow host or anything else - for about 30 years.

Keeping Up Appearances is one of only like 3 or 4 British shows I was aware of as an American kid. It was on public television here constantly. I don't know why.

― Jerome Percival Jesus (Old Lunch), Thursday, June 10, 2021 7:18 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was hungover in a hotel room in seattle in 2016 with pbs on and watched an episode of keeping up appearances, which i was baffled at (seems too british for anyone else to care, what did i know)

The only two celebrities who I ever remember I share a birthday with are Lenny Henry and Michael Jackson - they were actually born the same day as each other.

I forget Charlie Parker and remember Lenny Henry! Doh!

Re: "gameshow host", the word i was looking for is "presenter".

From what I'd seen him in at the time, I'd thought he was cast against type in Chef. He was sunnier than a Sunny D.

The word(s) you're looking for are "Trevor McDoughnut"

Lol

I don't think Lenny Henry has been jolly - as a gameshow host or anything else - for about 30 years.

New York public TV also had Good Neighbors and To the Manor Born, hence my enduring love for Penelope Keith.

Mention of The Brittas Empire reminds me that I haaaate that Britcom thing where they make up a character name and then force it into a "pun" for the series title. And yes, that includes Fawlty Towers.

Nelson's column with John Gordon Sinclair is the nadir of that

at least that worked and Nelson is a name. Brittas Empire way worse imo.

Lee & Herring had loads of these as ideas
-
A. Bird in the Hand (Anthony Bird is manager of the Hand pub), Anne R. in The Month (Anne R. is manager of The Month Pub) and by the end of the list coming up with There Are More Things In Heaven and Earth Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy (About how Ian Thing is joined by his relatives at the Heaven and Earth Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy pub).

See also
Roll Reversal - Ian Roll is a driving instructor, Ian Reversal is a baker. They swap jobs, with hilarious consequences.

Chalk and Cheese - Ian Chalk and Ian Cheese are two men. They are very different. However, they eventually become friends and realise they are not so different after all.

Bent Coppers - Ian and Iain Bent are brothers who are policemen. One is corrupt and the other is homosexual. They both suffer from curvature of the spine, and they're made of copper. They're robots in the future.