Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Yep. Did that by mistake the other day and then had to call back and re-cycle through about 15 stages of menu to get to where I was. VERY annoying.

discovered a couple of weeks ago that lionel messi isn't french.

I hear Dawn French is rather messy.

Yeah even Alfred was only King of Wessex, though there were various "Bretwalda" in the previous few centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretwalda

― Camaraderie at Arms Length

yet no one told me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otrt0iH9ubw

Mind blown by this.

And of course my occasional reminder that it's called My Fair Lady as that's how Eliza would pronounce Mayfair. The greatest and most understated phonetic pun in any movie title.

— Mark Lamarr (@lamarr_mark) December 26, 2022

holy shit me too duh

Kenny Rogers started out playing bass and was pretty good at it.

lots of shots of him playing in this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B45NsDaUa8o

Thanks. There is a video on social media of him playing upright bass with Dudley Moore jamming on “Satin Doll” on The Tonight Show that is particularly interesting. He gets a little lost during his solo and laughs but mostly sounds pretty good. Also didn’t know that Mickey Jones was in The First Edition.

Dudley Moore & Kenny Rogers: Satin Doll https://t.co/puvu5WXLUr via @notreble

— Kenny Rogers (@_KennyRogers) January 7, 2018

appears unavailable here, but this is also good ("what're you doing New Year's Eve?"):

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

In the "unknown bassist" category, I read that Giorgio Moroder spent the first part of his career playing stand-up bass in jazz groups.

legend has it that he was kicked out of the jazz scene because of his tendency to only play repeated arpeggio figures

Ukraine is like the size of Texas. !?

I laughingly said to my 20yo daughter that as a kid I one day expected to understand the "macaroni" reference in "Yankee Doodle Dandy" when I grew up - assuming it was just nonsense for the rhyme - when she said "oh no that was a term for a fashionable dandy at the time" which floored me.

Max’s Kansas City isn’t in Kansas.

It’s not even in NYC anymore. You can get prepackaged sushi on the site though.

and t-shirts last time i checked

Mind you, Kansas City isn't even in Kansas (well, not the main one)

that My Fair Lady thing is bullshit, imo, it's just a quote from "London Bridge Is Falling Down"; none of the action of the play/film takes place in Mayfair.

Yes but Mayfair is the archetypal posh place in London.

It's in Rex Harrison's memoir, and also in The Making of My Fair Lady:

https://i.imgur.com/7tdwcUX.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/7tdwcUX.png

I think it's kind of bullshit that a Cockney pronounces May as My, but that's b(a)y the by.

Rex Harrison snippet on Google Books

Whether she was cockney or not, someone needed to teach that girl how to talk, am I right fellas?!

The cockney pun thing is a good story but not correct. The title references G.B.S.'S working title for Pygmalion- "(My) Fair Eliza", plus the line from "London Bridge". As mentioned above it's not set in Mayfair. This would be like doing a Seinfeld musical and giving it a title that is a pun on New Jersey.

Does that not just mean it was GBS making the pun? It would be very much in character for him.

This would be like doing a Seinfeld musical and giving it a title that is a pun on New Jersey.

My Fair Lady to Mayfair is like Seinfeld to the West Village. It’s just two neighborhoods away.

Now I can't stop thinking about a version of My Fair Lady starring Elaine, Jerry and Kramer.

For a second I thought was going to say Dean and Jerry. Hey My Fair LADY!

'My Seinfeld Lady' might be somewhere close to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghCTZF61ey0

A day wasted is not a day without laughter.

"tie hoes to the runner" is apparently an urban myth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie_goes_to_the_runner?wprov=sfla1

Ned doesn't like Belle and Sebastian.

are you tattling?

Never knew until today that ‘Party Fears Two’ was used as theme music for Radio 4’s ‘Week Ending’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st1IhgWrtPQ

The Linux paste command.

nothing too shocking about it, but:

that Lucky Daye started his singing career under his real name David Brown, reaching the top 20 in season 4 of American Idol in 2005.

WTTW — the PBS affiliate in Chicago — stands for Window To The World.

(I already knew that WLS — ABC-TV affiliate, and onetime top 40 AM radio powerhouse — stood for World’s Largest Store, as they were initially sponsored by Marshall Field & Co.)

Took me a while to get the dog and cow that WFMU uses (woof, moo).

and WGN = world's greatest newspaper iirc

seriously was nobody else ignorant about macaroni

I was... but then I'm Canadian... but then we all knew the dumb song as kids anyway. I'm just thinking them yanks loves some pasta.

oh, i definitely was. i never really thought about it as a kid, i just kind of thought it was an absurd rhyme, and plus, i loved macaroni, so two thumbs up!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_(fashion)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Philip_Dawe%2C_The_Macaroni._A_Real_Character_at_the_Late_Masquerade_%281773%29.jpg

:|

wait, are you american? a lot of matthews around here ...

i'm american and remember learning about the macaroni thing at a really young age. i think in school we had worksheets for different folk songs with the lyrics typed out and a little glossary to help us understand.

only recently learned that the fears of being bitten by a Black widow or brown recluse are extremely exaggerated and that even if you get bitten by one, the chances of even going to the hospital, let alone dying, are very low, and in the US, nobody has died from a black widow bite in 30 years.

also learned that reports of bites from brown recluses are high in areas that don't even have them.

which is not to say that there aren't those that have adverse affects to spider bites from these types of spiders, but that usually a little antivenom and you're fine.

I think the movie Arachnophobia misshaped my view of the danger of spiders as a kid.

maffew12 is Canadian and I'm Australian

too many matts