Things you were shockingly old when you learned

oh yeah, one of the best. in small quantities though.

so creamy

Yeah, it's pretty rich. I eat a lot of cheese, but for that reason, I haven't had a blue for snacking in long time. It kind of blew me away.

have known for a long time that the children's network Nickelodeon was named after a sort of old-timey movie theatre. but i never put it together that that name just means an Odeon that costs five cents (a nickel).

and then a totally different thing that occurred to me this week is that taco in spanish means "wad", lol.

Was watching a Peppa Pig with the 3-year-old, the Pig family are walking in the park on a foggy day, and Peppa asks what fog is. Daddy Pig says “fog is a cloud that’s on the ground“, and I was like oh yeah, duh

Clouds can be on the ground if the ground is high enough.

Seance means "meeting" in French

As does reunion.

Seance doesn't quite mean meeting, it's more like session or sitting.

Right. Like the seance is the screening time of a film.

This is the way "meeting" was used in Mercyful Fate's "A Dangerous Meeting"

Though I suppose it might have also been about Tupperware

xp I just realised on seeing the post about seance that session had a similar etymological derivation about seating. Not sure if I got that before but can see now the root is that.

Does this in any way connect "secession" to "we're not meeting anymore"?

aggravatingly it does not! the latin root of secession is cedere with a c (to withdraw) rather than sedere with an s (to sit)

notorious typo to be on the look out for: supercede and supercession (both wrong) for supersede and supersession (from the latin supersedere, to sit right on top of)

(these may have been easier to kept apart a few centuries back, when the c was still hard)

tho i guess by normal usage as opposed to stupid etymology (and to honour the joke) secession is a very good way to announce that we're not meeting any more :)

a session cessation if you will

Must be the session of the witch.

til Elvis had an identical twin brother who was stillborn.

... called Jesse and Scott Walker wrote a song about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYyOkQUyJZM

Nick Cave's "The Firstborn Is Dead" is a reference to him too.

Jesse Garon and the Desperados were named after him.

A 17-year-old boy shot at the Queen from a tall building during a state visit to New Zealand in 1981. He missed.

pot shot from the local museum iirc. that was just one of that particular person's various exploits & it was well up hushed up, but yeah.

That there's a website with a sampling of the videos and a list of teh dances involved from the video I saw the 4 hour version of at teh TULCA festival last year.

Video clips here
https://www.universaltongue.com/video-edition

and separate alphabetical lists of the forms of dance here
https://www.universaltongue.com/dance-styles-az

the 4 hour version is quite mesmeric and kaleidoscopic and I think a much shorter summary of a much longer original mix.
THey mixed a stack of video together for the film they wound up with. All edited to teh beat.

I just came across a reference to some of the voguing from Paris is Burning over the weekend which I think had some clips included in the mix, if not directly from there similar vintage voguing which was just one of a load of pretty jawdropping dance footage included.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlbX7iMc8Lc

you can have 2 different numbers on the same mobile phone. Took me a minute to work out why my new phone had slots for 2 sim cards and that is the reason. Is that widespread now?

also that phones no longer open to let you swap batteries etc. previous phone was several years old so opened so you could change battery, put sim and memory card in slots within phone. new one had a tray that could be popped out.

That a band like Dry Cleaning would be playing in Argentina. Not sure if that reflects an opening up of the touring map or if this is more exceptional. Really not familiar with the amount of non-massive bands that tour South America but very surprised to see a live set by them from there and there is one up on Dime.
Like do indie like bands tour there now.

Seems to be some video of the show circulating though an upping to youtube has been removed.
Also seeing they played Chile too

The word "czar" or "tsar" is a Russian derivation of the German "kaiser," which itself is a derivation of "Caesar." I believe the American usage of the word "czar" (as a politically appointed head of something) is actually unique to America, and may have started getting used more often under Roosevelt as a exotic/foreign-sounding word perhaps less likely to raise the hackles of Americans wary of authoritarian titles/implications.

It's not unique to the US we've got dozens of them over here.

I think I missed that, but maybe it's unique to the US and UK, then. I wonder if the term went into circulation in both places at the same time or for the same reason?

czar is only one way to find out

I'm surprised that the etymological derivation isn't more directly from Latin but there are several centuries between first noted usage and the Roman Empire.
Also since I think the first version of the word I saw was Czar it might be more obvious that way since it just looks like a mispelling which could be phonetic through usage or something.

Dragonball Z = dragon balls

iirc in Japan "Z" is a symbol for evolution or ultimate or something like that.

yeah, and when Toriyama added the Z to the already well-established DragonBall series, it was marking a substantial shift in the aesthetic/emphasis. it's not a "balls" thing, afaik.

Growing up in the UK in the 70s it was normal to have separate hot and cold water taps. I was shockingly old when I learned that this wasn't the norm in other countries.

It’s very common in other countries

working with international students in the UK, this is absolutely one of the top complaints they have, it is not normal outside the UK.

I assume the main alternative is to have a single outlet with separate hot and cold controls which means that you can mix the heat of water that comes out. Not sure if I saw that before i visited the US for the first time in the mid 70s but it does seem like a basic practical solution for use.

things i was *this old* when i learned em = the term "czar" in US political usage goes back fully 100 years (= even more than me), to woodrow wyatt's appointment of bernard baruch as "industry czar" (war-related co-ordination of mobilisation etc etc, mamagerial revolution birth-of-the-technocracy stuff): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czar_(political_term) <-- less clear from wikipedia and its citations is whether this formula was used immediately (in 1916 or 1918) or only in considerable retrospect

FDR also liked to appoint czars and so did nixon and so did obama -- and it came across into the UK in the third-way era (blair of course lol; alan fkn sugar got to be one)

(in uk i think the papers preferred "tsar" to "czar")

Separate taps are common in Portugal, I'll boldly tackle this binary by suggesting it might be common in some parts outside the UK and uncommon in others.

it was v common in my old flat but is uncommon in my current one

Croisant munching, latte sipping single tap users.

The separate taps thing was pretty standard in New Zealand, though I’m assuming only in older builds now

many, many years ago, a school caretaker caught me drinking from a warm tap at school, and he told me I shouldn't do this because there was a dead pigeon in the rusty old water tank above. Even though he was obviously pulling my leg, it was still a very important lesson!

yeah, remember it being pointed out a few different times and places that hot water came from standing tank and cold more straight from external supply. So more likely to come across dead things in supply that fed hot water. Therefore don't drink from there.

it's just that other countries if you can afford to travel then your house almost certainly doesn't have victorian plumbing

I thought the separate taps thing is a building code standard in the UK, like the giant grounded electrical outlets and light bulb sockets and gently curving motorways. There for some (possibly outdated) solid engineering reason.

Seperate taps, in my mind, is definitely a UK thing. The other two countries I've lived in (France and Australia) don't have them.