Things you were shockingly old when you learned

he also calls Rocky fat and weak and a disgrace!

It's Rocky 13 so it's presumably taking place at LEAST 10 years later which is plenty of time for the champ to get fat and lazy, cf. Raging Bull

but that's rude to call him that!

besides a choice between rye and kaiser IS NO CHOICE

"No one in the US knew or cared who he was, and he was the only Beatle to have had that fame-free experience in America."

You'd think at least one person would have asked him if he was Clem Burke - especially given that it was New York.

Apparently Harrison's trip to the US involved a bit of self-promotion, so it wasn't entirely a holiday:
https://www.beatlesbible.com/1963/09/16/george-harrison-holiday-america/

"While in Benton, George Harrison performed with a local group, The Four Vests, at the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Hall in Eldorado, IL. The guest spot was arranged by (his sister) Louise. The Four Vests played their normal set during the first half of the show, then returned to the stage and introduced Harrison as "the Elvis of England".

Harrison wore a dark suit and white shirt with no tie. They performed songs including 'Roll Over Beethoven', 'Johnny B Goode', 'Matchbox' and 'Your Cheatin' Heart'."

Looking at photos from the period he seems to have worn the Beatles suit even when he was relaxing, so perhaps he only brought a couple of sets of clothes with him to the US. Perhaps he thought had to dress smart because New York was the big city. Or perhaps that's what British people looked like in their default state. I'm turning into the Steve Hoffman forums, oh no!

We drove down that way last year and passed the George Harrison roadside tribute:

https://bentonil.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harrison-Post-Card-Final-Image.jpg

Also down that way (generally speaking) is the second biggest cross in America and the original Burger King, which is unrelated to the chain beyond a historic lawsuit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_(Mattoon,_Illinois)

Drive a bit further down from Benton and you hit Metropolis, IL - "hometown" of Superman - around the border with Kentucky.

Road trip!

I didn't know it was a cover until today when I read this thread and then heard it on the radio later this afternoon for the first time in decades.

I didn’t know it was a cover either.

OK, so that explains how George Harrison was able to come up with a good, catchy song in 1987.

― Tom D: I was in the army (Tom D.), Friday, July 22, 2022 12:18 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Apparently I’m the only one around here that’ll rep for “When We Was Fab”.

That Chris Pine's dad was the sergeant on CHiPs.

That the use of 'nimrod' as a pejorative likely originated in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Learned this last one from one of my kids.

here's daffy saying it to elmer fudd in 1948:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8MRRq36d6w

here's bugs saying it abt yosemite sam in 1951 (the version i mainly remember):

However, an earlier Looney Tunes cartoon, "What Makes Daffy Duck" (1948) DID have Elmer being called nimrod...by DAFFY. So it was actually Daffy who first used the term sarcastically https://t.co/RoRAGLNFho

— Charles Brubaker - TEAM BLOOM (@bakertoons) October 25, 2020

annoyingly wikipedia mentions a 1932 example (pre-bugs or daffy) without properly sourcing it

oops those are the same:

While Bugs did use "nimrod" sarcastically once, he did it to refer to Yosemite Sam, not Elmer. This was in "Rabbit Every Monday" (1951), where Bugs, feeling guilty for tricking Sam, said "I couldn't do that to the little Nimrod" (skip to 6:50) https://t.co/IOPnzEFTB4

— Charles Brubaker - TEAM BLOOM (@bakertoons) October 25, 2020

I was somewhat less old (but still shockingly so) when I realized that El DeBarge was the name of one of the guys in DeBarge and not just a rebranding of DeBarge (as 'The DeBarge').

fuck all those looney toons villains anyway, according to this 1998 cartoon promo they're all chasers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ombeEg0VA

watching the Sky Arts documentary about the Blitz Club in london that spawned the new romantics. hadn't realised the club was a London blitz-themed club full of wwii era posters etc

The original linking (no pun intended) of "dog" with sausage - as in, eventually, "hot dog" - goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century in the US, when the nursery rhyme song "Oh where oh where has my little dog gone?" was twisted to torment German immigrants:

"Oh! Where, oh! Where ish mine little dog gone?
Oh! where, oh! Where can he be?
His ear’s cut short, and his tail cut long:
Oh! Where, oh! where ish he?

Tra, la la….

Und sausage is goot: Baloney, of course,
Oh! where, oh! where can he be?
Dey makes ‘em mit dog, und dey makes ‘em mit horse:
I guess dey makes ‘em mit he."

FWIW, "hot” was code for "dodgy;" "hot" dogs were cheap.

though i have long known that there are correspondences between many hebrew / arabic names (e.g. abraham and ibrahim), i was just made aware of two fairly obvious ones: david / dawud and solomon / sulayman

Sherilyn Fenn is Suzi Quatro's niece according to Quatro in her memoir Unzipped. Don't think I've heard that before picking the book up a few days ago.

Woah.

Seconded.

Chuck Eddy mentions that in Stairway to Hell.

That Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek wasn't called Michelle.

Arabic one I just learned.

aubergine (UK/France) <- alberginera (Catalan) <- al-badinjan (Arabic) -> brinjal (India)

not shocking, but neat.

I really want a terrible fake american derivation for eggplant now, but after egg-plant it’s like fuck, do u c?

What the “circular file” means

I think I only saw why the name eggplant applies a couple of years ago. Since the version that is normally seen in supermarkets etc is the aubergine purple teardrop shaped one and small rounder white ones only turn up in Asian shops. & even then are more likely to be Green striped or black or something.
Like some types actually look egglike.

They all look egglike when they first start to grow I think

https://✧✧✧.shop✧✧✧.com/s/files/1/2406/3467/products/Intore_AfricanEggplant4edsq_1024x1✧✧✧@2✧.j✧✧?v=1650043634
or
https://www.thespruceeats.com/thmb/cPVQfx_aOvzW94t7jgU1BRzKE8c=/450x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-126552553-5c5dd7adc9e77c0001d31c52.jpg

though not sure either is likely to work and this as in the emoji is the way that I was always seeing them
https://gardenplannerwebsites.azureedge.net/plants/aubergine-2x.jpg
though on a shelf or display or whatever not with much connection to a plant it was growing from

I came across aubergine as a colour when i first started buying fabric last decade and wasn't sure exactly what shade it would be. What I saw was a deep purple, not as blackish as some of these turn out to be.,

BUt seems that there is a wide array of different varieties, just came across a page recommending 17 that one should look into growing. So not sure what that is a boiling down from.
I do tend to put aubergine in most of my weekly cookups and use it to guage if the dish is done. THough think I may be checking sweet potato's hardness recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHhsc4lYamc

AUBERGINE!

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years. Somehow that fact escaped me until today.

Didn’t know that either. To what extent is the population there even of the same historical group? I sorta assumed there was a big influx of people that would outweigh the population who would have been subject to that occupation.

A great movie about the late 40's bloody and authoritarian Kuomintang takeover of Taiwan is Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterpiece, A City of Sadness.

TY calzino

Been in a “the past is not dead” mindframe this past year, having read snyder’s _bloodlands_ followed months later by putin hitting ukraine. really really swerved my perceptions.

like, with the starvations, death camps, war, political psychoses, and forced out- and in-migrations, to what extent are populations of national spaces even of the same historical memories?

totally

we grow up thinking of nations as these fixed linguistic and ethnic entities but yes even within living memory in many many places this is just not the case

Mick Jones and Grant Shapps are cousins.

The black shapp of the family.

Today I learnt from this thread that Nimrod was ever used as a pejorative, in Looney Tunes or otherwise! Only knew it as the name of a Biblical hunter and an aircraft.

i think i saw the hunter reference in my youth (wanna say in moby dick?) and as i only was aware of the cartoon pejorative i was sorta baffled. "yeah, that ahab, what a maroon!"

I knew it as an insult from Looney Tunes and was confused when Nimrod later turned up to be the name of a villain in the x-men comics. I just assumed nimrod meant dummy, and couldn't figure out why this character had such a name.

My dad used to write a newspaper column on outdoors sport, and whenever he got verbose and referred his "nimrod brethren" it would prompt an angry letter or two from hunters who felt insulted.

https://www.swl.usace.army.mil/Missions/Recreation/Lakes/Nimrod-Lake/

I was just thinking about how, growing up at the height of “Tears in Heaven” airplay, I thought Eric Clapton was an American soft rock/adult contemporary singer until my late 20s. It was only then I learned he was known as a guitar virtuoso, and over the last 5 years ago that I learned, in the following order 1) he was in Cream, 2) Cream is British 3) he is British.

lol i think i had a similar arc with eric clapton

I mean, judging him just on the hits like "Rock n' Roll Heart", he is kinda in that Bob Seger mold.

I learned as a teenager that Clapton was a bellend via music press mentions of his racist rant and support for Enoch Powell. Then when I was about 15 and watched The South Bank Show on Jimi Hendrix, which featured a lot of him talking then I learned as well as being a racist cunt he was also a detestable personality!

It was also just yesterday, looking up his wikipedia, that I learned he’s a pretty shitty person (racism, spousal abuse, etc). Not surprised that’s left out of guitar god hagiography, though.