Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Robert E Lee lead the army unit that stopped John Brown from his attempted raid. I think that was in Ibram X Kendi's Stamped From The Beginning, definitely read about it somewhere over the last week. So does that already put him on the wrong side of history before the civil war?

I heard a few years ago that Arlington cemetery was located so that it went right up to Lee's door so he would be continually reminded of the mess he had caused.

back to the snapping!

That the loud clicking sound generated by clicking/snapping one’s fingers is the sound of the finger hitting the fleshy part of the palm

i've been experimenting, and this is only partly the case. the snap sound is the wave being amplified through the little tube created by your ring and pinkie being closed against the palm. if you block the hole of your downturned pinky, no snap sound. just the dull thud of your middle finger.

the little tube created by your ring and pinkie

Ban this filth

long live the new flesh

I heard a few years ago that Arlington cemetery was located so that it went right up to Lee's door so he would be continually reminded of the mess he had caused.

I don't think the Union ever planned for the Lees to ever reclaim the property anyway.

He may have been on the wrong side of history when he captured John Brown, but he was wearing stars and stripes while doing it.

I swear I was at least 20 when I learned that you could only legally terminate a pregnancy in the first several weeks

Plan B not legal?

That Dublin was established as a Viking town.

(Basically the entire history of the Vikings in the UK has eluded me until very recently.)

Norse Gaels, for instance

Plan B not legal?

Notably not referred to as “the month or two after pill”

Plan B doesn’t terminate pregnancy.

oops, i misread

okay I just learned today that Ocelots live wild in the United States

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/02/65/03/17518821/3/2400x0.jpg

I just learned that Cadillac and Rolls Royce are makes, not models.

I am wearing my favorite t shirt right now. It has a picture of a margay on it, but everyone thinks it's of an ocelot.

last night, looking up what the heck is kohlrabi, i learned that it, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale and collard greens are all the same species --- just been cultivated and bred from the original wild cabbage into these extremely different forms.

https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/brassica-oleracea.jpg

I assume you can eat the respective parts of each of the variations there are just going to be far less of them because of what the breeding process has focused on. & they will be less flavorful?

Ingenious.

Today I learned that the girls on the cover of Roxy Music's Country Life LP were the sister and girlfriend of Michael Karoli out of Can.

The name of Missing Persons' first LP, Spring Session M, is an anagram of the band's name.

The process of making fabric soft enough to wear next to your skin out of bamboo is apparently deeply detrimental to any ecological benefit you get from doing so. Hear it outlined on a webinar last night that it is a heavily chemical viscose like process. So whereas it is a fast growing wood that works well as wood it isn't as universal a product for other ethical usage and fun stuff like that, like.

Wait, who is making bamboo clothing?

the adverts on UK tv have mostly been either sports shoes or underwear but a quick Google shows a bigger range, but still mostly sporty

Seems to be mostly underwear for fat shouty annoying - possibly Australian - men.

haven't seen adverts but there was a shop called Mabboo in our shopping centre that was selling bamboo clothing. I got a bamboo tshirt from a bamboo clothing store in NYC about 10 years ago, so it was a thing then.
The viscose thing is interesting; there was a brief history of its production on A House Through Time recently.

xp yeah, Step One ads seem to be on during every show, but last christmas there were others which had men strutting around wearing nothing but boxers and panda heads (particularly amusing as our work squad had panda as a code name - p & a)

Allbirds are the bamboo running shoe ads that are similarly common.

I had some bamboo socks a few years ago but they shrank in the wash.

viscose similarly takes a hard substyance and pulps it then breaks things down chemically before creating a synthetic substance from it to make clothing from. Sounds like it was a good step on the route to further development when the process was discovered but it is not a healthy ecological process so that leaves viscose as a not very green fabric too. Shame since it is the one fabric I've found so far taht I can get tartan that I can make trousers from that I can actually wear.
Same speaker was pointing out the negatives in the production of cotton, wool and a few others too . Like seems like there are few fabric production processes that are actually all that positive. Sheep need to be fed and then the resultant wool needs to be heavily treated before it can be used, cotton is not a great positive plant and processes for preproduction of fabric aren't great either. Loads of things are very water consuming and leave a lot of pollution in their wake.
The point of the webinar was to point out that the production processes didn't tend to be very green and I think it was well made. But people need to wear clothing both traditionally and environmentally and so some things are at least semi necessary. Could all be improved though.

Well people need to stop throwing clothing away after six months, would help. Putting it in a charity bin doesn’t absolve the sin.

The best solution is nudism.

Couple more years it'll be too hot to wear clothes anyway.

I thought clothes were meant to be worn once

Well people need to stop throwing clothing away after six months, would help. Putting it in a charity bin doesn’t absolve the sin.

― assert (MatthewK), Thursday, October 14, 2021 6:09 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I bought my first pairs of new pants in more than 2 years this past weekend, and realize that I've had some t-shirts for a decade if not more. It actually boggles my mind that people go through clothes so quickly.

I thought clothes were meant to be worn once

"Alessia Teresko, a 21-year-old student from Nottingham, seldom wears the same outfit online twice."

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/oct/06/out-of-style-will-gen-z-ever-give-up-its-dangerous-love-of-fast-fashion

(xp) Only a decade? I've got t-shirts that are over 30 years old. I don't wear them very often mind you!

some of us had to buy new clothes because we got fat during the pandemic, mind

prior to that, I got years out of all of my shirts. now pretty much anything bought before like july of last year, I can't wear without Hulk ripping

I tend to only keep T-shirts for a few years. The oldest one I own right now, I think, is from SXSW in 2010. I have a few others from 2011-2012. But almost everything else is less than five years old.

I mean, what if I walk into Target in my blue Target t-shirt and there's another dude there wearing the same blue Target t-shirt? Christ, how embarrassing.

Yeah I have 20 year old t shirts still in active service. I get through jeans in about 3 years tho, they wear out in inappropriate places.

my oldest t-shirt is from atp 2003, though it has a hole in now so is relegated to pyjama duty.

The idea is that you get a 2nd usage from an item. Like if its clothing you go decently made item that lasts, followed by patching for other items or household rags or upcycling the non worn out bits into something more substantial. THings wind up worn out to the point of collapse through wear and usage instead of being very badly made and wearing out after a couple of wears. I think a lot of fast fashion doesn't have seaming that can be repaired. Most long term usage clothing has a bit of fabric in the seam allowance that one can sew into in order to repair.
NOt sure about 2ary usages for bits of non clothing items but there ought to be some. The idea of planed obsolescence and things being designed to be absolutely unusable after breakage should be moving back into the past. The idea of dsiposability was always undermined by the diffculty of actually permanently disposing of things that wasn't detrimental to the environment. It just lead to a load of landfill and broken things being around in the environment without further usage. O think Metal and wooden things can be used ad hoc by alteration that you couldn't really do with plastic. Like you can weld or cut off bits of other substances and they will take weight/pressure etc whereas a loto f plastics just didn't lend themselves to that.

Just prompted by a comment in the Sinema On Sinema thread to look up the source material for Husker Du's How To Skin A Cat which I had just figured must be an older song. I guess I hear it too infrequently to have thought about that much before. It dates back to a 1920s mock advert intended to warn potential investors about get rich quick schemes etc. & apparently fooling a lot of people into looking into how to invest.more here
http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2016/03/25/the-most-unbelievable-ad-you-ever-saw/

I still have a Lollapalooza 1992 tshirt as well as the Phish one I remember wearing in while I was in jail for two days in 1994. Neither is really in regular rotation though.

some of us had to buy new clothes because we got fat during the pandemic, mind

― Gardyloominati (Neanderthal), Thursday, October 14, 2021 3:54 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes.

The bigger thing though is that although I still have some positively ancient t-shirts still in circulation, many newer articles of clothing have already hit the skids because everything is increasingly (and intentionally) made like shit (see also the thing where I'm currently wearing a sturdy-ass pair of glasses from twenty years ago because every single pair of glasses I've owned since has broken from just like regular wear).

i have had numerous pairs of jeans rip after like only 3 months worth of wear. i've learned to uhhh buy more reliable brands, cos boy is that not something fun when it happens in public

I have an SST "Blasting Concept" t-shirt that came with the cassette comp (which vanished years ago) as a package deal, probably from 1986 or so? I don't wear it often but it gets to guest star once in awhile.

Buying more expensive and better made jeans is a real thing. I had a pair of jeans I wore every day for 1.5 years during which they saw riots, stints in jail, hopping freight trains across the country, and living in a squat— I spent $120 bucks on them. When they fell apart, I immediately went out and bought another pair

I have some shirts from pre-2010 but they are few and far between, mostly because of an incident with a incontinent cat in 2012 where half of my wardrobe was ruined.