Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Should You Eat Shellfish Only in Months with an 'R'?

I watched this video last year about clams being used as a kind of water pollution alarm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtanyJuW5CA

I thought oysters spawned in the non-R months? And spewed gross stuff everywere

story of my love life

The pipehitter thing is extra funny because I assume spec ops bros initially picked it up from Pulp Fiction thinking it meant badass instead of “insane crackhead.”

― Joe Bombin (milo z), Thursday, June 17, 2021 1:49 PM (two hours ago)

I assumed until just now that it mean that marcellus wallace was esoteric enough that he had associates who where known for their shtick of literally hitting people with pipes.

I did and still do

is that a joke?

pipe-hitting: that's where i hit people with pipes

uhh yeah that's pretty obviously what it means in the movie lol

oh god not you too

i'm pretty sure Marcellus doesn't want to leave the torture of his sodomizer to Chris Rock's character from New Jack City

he says something along the lines of "im going to call up a pair of hard piep-hittin' ... to go to work on the homes with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch". they're not going to be hitting him with a pipe, they are crackheads

technically the latter part was a callback to a line from Charley Varrick

yes tarantino likes to steal

apparently in a deleted scene marcellus actually calls Mr Wolf, suggesting that he decides for a more professional torturer

Should You Eat Shellfish Only in Months with an 'R'?

― Kim Kimberly, Wednesday, June 16, 2021 4:46 PM (two days ago)

thank you for the link. the reasons listed there are why i've largely stopped harvesting my own oysters. "leave it to the pros, i say." (old latin phrase.)

ive freshly shucked oysters that ive picked in the middle of a hot summer, but i don't think i'd do it again. a couple of years ago some friends of mine were at a friend's parents' cabin and harvested some oysters. half the people who ate them spent the remainder of their trip having diarrhea while vomiting, there being only one outhouse a lot of this was done in the bushes. vile

Otto Preminger briefly played Mr. Freeze on the 1960s Batman TV series. I feel like I should have encountered this fun fact at some point already while reading about Preminger or Batman!

I knew John Saxon had been in a bunch of Italian movies and figured it was just like a Christopher George sitch with an American actor making a bunch of overseas flicks and ADR-ing his dialogue after the fact, but I saw The Girl Who Knew Too Much today in the original Italian which is where I learned to my surprise that he was actually fluent.

(Incidentally, I also learned that Christopher George was Vanna White's uncle. A very educational day.)

I was today years old when I learned percentages are reversible.

So 6% of 50 is the same as 50% of 6, which is a lot easier to work out

— Adam Smith (@adamndsmith) June 26, 2021

no wonder The Wealth of Nations is such a pile of shit if he's just working out how numbers work now

THomnas Pakenhman who wrote the Scramble For Africa is an Earl Of Longford who writes books about trees. JUst found that out.

That the Anglican/Episcopalian church is catholic, just not Roman Catholic.

I first learned this from The Transmigration of Timothy Archer but it was confirmed by my actively Episcopalian boss, whose father is a retired priest.

Catholic is just an old term meaning universal, isn't it? And retains that sense in expressions like 'catholic tastes'

that percentage thing is both head-smack obvious and crayzayy

I spent my Anglican childhood reciting “And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church” as part of the creed.

Catholic is just an old term meaning universal, isn't it? And retains that sense in expressions like 'catholic tastes'

Yes, English has retained its etymological meaning, whereas French, for instance, has not.

Is the Anglican church the result of Henry VIII wanting to split from the church to divorce his first wife so prior to Luther and Calvin being dominant forces. At least in Britain?

How old Debbie Harry is, older than Van Morrison, Davy Jones, Syd Barrett, Lesley Gore and Dolly Parton. 5 years older than Stevie Wonder!

I knew Blondie didn't form until she was almost 30, but it's pretty crazy in that comparison.

_Catholic is just an old term meaning universal, isn't it? And retains that sense in expressions like 'catholic tastes'_


Yes, English has retained its etymological meaning, whereas French, for instance, has not.

I mean, Diet Coke is still a Coke, I guess.

"...Henry VIII wanting to split from the church to divorce his first wife so prior to Luther and Calvin being dominant forces..."

Dominant is probably the key word here - Martin Luther's Edict of Worms was 1521, England's break with Rome was the 1530's

You can lock the screen on a Windows PC by hitting the Windows key plus L. Easier than Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

Windows + m to bring up the desktop is another good one.

* That "Sixty Minute Man" - a song I've loved since my mom introduced me to it in my teenage years, is not just an excellent R&B record from say, 1957 or so - it's from 1951 and recognized as a pivotal and important record in the history of rock and roll. The rock-docs and other texts I'd absorbed on the genre never mentioned it. And I don't think I've heard it on the radio since the day my mom caught it on the "Oldies" station circa 1995 and got all excited.

I didn't realize it was that old, either. I kinda figured it was from the mid '50s, right around the same time as Hank Ballard & the Midnighters.

"Sixty Minute Man" is one of those things where the first time you encounter it you're like, "People got away with this back then?" It's like that W.C. Fields short where he's a dentist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qYmFXWtdo8

I just realized that in the song about bottles of beer on the wall, the bottles are ON TOP OF the wall and falling off. I thought that they were nailed or otherwise suspended somehow in the middle of the wall before falling to the floor.

Like one would say a painting was "on the wall".

I thought they were on a shelf on the wall! "Take one down, pass it around...."

I also thought it was a shelf on the wall, after I determined that they were not clinging to the wall in defiance of gravity.

It makes exactly no sense to store beer on a wall, no matter how you do it.

But that's only one of the problems.

If you have 99 bottles, there's no need to take one down and pass it around. Just give everyone their own bottle. Much more hygienic and more efficient.

Stays colder that way too. Like if I'm last in line, I'm going to want to take one sip at a time from each of 99 bottles of warm beer with everyone else's spit and germs?

Just give everyone a bottle. Then another if they want it. You have plenty of beer. Jeez.

I was shockingly old when I learned what song you're talking about. In the UK (as far as I know) we didn't have this song, but we had another song with similar lyrics and a different tune that goes like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0ooQv7oHvw

Though the Wikipedia page for your 99 bottles song says one of the alternative lyrics is "If one of those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles of beer on the wall...", which is what we sang in our song.

Green Bottles is the original, the others are, er, variants.

It's weird they ended up with a completely different tune as well then.

I always wondered how bottles "hang" on a wall, do they have those rafia holders like in a crap pub?

It seem there was a theory for a while that the green bottles were slang for policemen but then a 14th century manuscript complicated things:

Green bottle' academic not hanging around

Brian Hunt
National Post

Prof. Pierre d'Ouidlede displays the manuscript fragment at the Ecole de vielle musique in Grenoble. The picture was taken shortly after the discovery of the artifact in September, 1998.

https://i.imgur.com/tkmG8qy.jpg

A fiercely intense debate about the nature of scholarship, sparked by the discovery of a fragment of English folk song, has taken a new twist this week with the disappearance of the Canadian scholar who has been a chief protagonist. Dr. Brett Shatner, the musicologist who has been taking his European counterparts to task for their alleged lack of intellectual rigour, was reported missing from his Don Mills, Ont., residence last Friday.

This sudden vanishing act (Shatner was due to deliver a lecture in North York, Ont., this morning) brings to a climax a story that began in September. The song that sparked academic acrimony is an unlikely bone of contention: the English ditty Ten Green Bottles, a variant of which is well known in North America as 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

In all previously known versions of the English song the verses count down to "no green bottles" from the figure 10, thus:

"Ten green bottles hanging on the wall
Ten green bottles hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle should accidentally fall
There'd be nine green bottles hanging on the wall . . ."

However, in September, 1998, a French scholar, Pierre d'Ouidlede, announced the discovery of a page of poetry manuscript, apparently dating from the late 14th century, containing what seems to be an early version. Allowing for changes in language between the Chaucerian age and our own, the scheme of the song seems unmistakably the same:

"Syxthene boetell gryne
Yhangen, Yhangen
Yhangen, Yhangen
Syxthene boetell gryne
Doonfal won
Syxthene boetell gryne
Yhangen, Yhangen
An . . ."

Frustratingly, the manuscript breaks off at that point. Nevertheless, musicologists were immediately abuzz at discovering that one of the best-known songs in the English language was some five centuries older than previously thought.
Speaking on the highbrow BBC Radio 3 in November, 1998, Prof. Peter Muddelwheat of the University of Thatcham in southern England declared: "It may be one of our silliest songs, but it is sublimely silly, and I personally am thrilled to think of the like of Chaucer's pilgrims passing the time [by singing it] . . . Obviously there were verses between this and [the verse beginning] 'Ten green bottles' . . . and the unlikelihood that it would have started at a random number such as 16 strongly suggests there are other verses out there waiting to be found."

Shatner, a freelance musicologist and philosopher from Toronto, heard the broadcast while visiting London for a symposium. To the Canadian, the English professor's words were a red rag to a bull -- to which animal's droppings he allegedly alluded in the e-mail he immediately fired to Muddelwheat's office.

The exact contents of that communication have not been made public, but a slightly more restrained version of the same argument was published in The Daily Telegraph a few days later. Wrote Shatner: "It is a profound shock to see the depths to which British scholarship seems to have sunk. If it is "obvious" to Prof. Muddelwheat that verses exist for which there is no material evidence, then he should perhaps change his professional title to 'clairvoyant' rather than 'musicologist.' "

Muddelwheat responded in a letter printed in the Telegraph two days later: "I am not sure what standards apply in Canada," he wrote, "but in Great Britain we have been around long enough to have the confidence to approach questions of scholarship with a certain degree of common sense . . . it is particularly sad that Mr. (sic) Shatner seems unable to distinguish between informal remarks made in a radio broadcast and the very different disciplines of academic publication. Perhaps in his country scholarship does not go back beyond the invention of wireless."

The Telegraph allowed one more letter, a reply from Shatner, before declaring the correspondence closed. Repeating his point that deductions must be based on evidence ("It is this that separates the scholar from the layman"), Shatner asserted that there was no exact correspondence between the mediaeval verse and the modern song: "It is a gigantic leap of faith to say they are one and the same. It is, for a musicologist, an unpardonable act to assume the existence of material that links separate entities."

If the Telegraph thought it had quashed the debate, it was mistaken. Three weeks later, in another British publication, Lucas's Curios, Mr. E. C. Poswaithe claimed that he had done extensive research into the song Ten Green Bottles while at university in the early 1950s. He had, he said, proved to his own satisfaction that the song originated in the London underworld of the 1830s.

"Sir Robert Peel's 1829 Metropolitan Police Act had made life much less comfortable for the criminal classes. The bane of their life were the officers of the law known by various popular names: 'bobbies' and 'peelers' in honour of their founder and, on account of their green uniforms and curved helmets, giving them in profile a resemblance to a string bean, 'the Bow Street Runners.'

"To the criminal world, however, they were almost universally known as 'greenbottles' and, since they were responsible for the hanging of many a felon, what could be more satisfying than the thought of 10 greenbottles hanging on a wall?" To those who put forward alternative derivations, Poswaithe said he had a simple answer. "If these are glass bottles, why should they be 'hanging' rather than 'standing' on a wall -- the latter situation would not only be more logical but more likely to precipitate the destructive series of tumbles the song catalogues incrementally."

The matter might have rested there had not Postwaithe gone on to suggest that the discovery of the "lost verse" might be a hoax.

The hitherto silent d'Ouidlede made his first and so far only contribution to the controversy in the January, 1999, issue of Lucas's Curios. "While I cannot comment on the opinions expressed by my colleagues . . . I can assure everyone that the manuscript is entirely genuine. It was found in the collection of a 19th-century Spanish curator, Don Valliparque, and has been authenticated by a number of experts." The magazine carried a photographic reproduction of the fragment.

Anyone hoping for a final word from Shatner is, for the time being anyway, likely to be disappointed. This morning he was due to appear at the North York Centre for Advanced Thought in suburban Toronto to present a paper titled "After the colon: the words before the colon considered in context." However, a spokesman at the Centre, situated above Spice - Wings, confirmed that the lecture had been cancelled as Shatner has been officially reported as missing. Neighbours at his Don Mills residence say he was last seen on Friday, heading in the direction of Hamilton, Ont.

the spoof, the spoof, the spoof is on fire!

First appeared in the National Post, April 01, 1999
(Note date)