Things you were shockingly old when you learned

this plane was designed by the Concordski guy, not sure if he was a terrible designer or the Soviet system was all geared towards getting things done a bit too fast.

James Ure OBE (born 10 October 1953) is a British musician, singer-songwriter and record producer. His stage name, Midge, is a phonetic reversal of Jim, the diminutive form of his actual name.

I dunno, I always sort of assumed he was called Midge, never thought about it tbh

I assumed it was because he was small. I don't know if he is or not though.

.. 5 feet 6 and a half. I suspect it was a dual purpose nickname tbh.

Midhe Ure has more of a ring to it than Shortarse Ure I suppose, although not much

Midhe Ure, is that the Gaelic version of his name?

Maidhe (pronounced "Fred")

Every time I think of Midge Ure I think of Rik Mayall knocking on his door and calling him "Midge UEEEUUUURRGHHH" in Bottom, or Filthy Rich & Catflap whichever one it was.

In the musical Oklahoma!, the song "The Surrey With the Fringe on Top" describes the surrey as having "isinglass curtains you can roll right down" although here the term refers to mica, commonly used for windows in vehicle side screens (but totally inflexible).[13][14]

oh i'd love that, i'd be a mineral deposit, a ball of isinglass curtains inside a rock

If goldfish grow to fit the size of the pond they're in how big a waterway would you need to grow a fish that could provide curtains for Surrey? I mean, like.

a neat summary of the previous conversation, but does it work with sturgeon

THat a load of the titles that were in the sale section in Guerssen at the start of the pandemic 3 years ago are still there. Which has me wondering how many copies of things they got and put there in the first place. Thought some of that Turkish and middle eastern stuff would be popular so is that an overcalculation they made themselves?
Anyway worth having a look at if you are into the area of early 70s Turkish & middle eastern psych rock or funk influenced hybrids. Cos there are a load of titles there still.

The first Sham 69 single was produced by John Cale.

not enough electric viola iirc

I probably did know that at one point because I've got that single and it says on the back, but if I ever did know that I'm learning it again now

continuing the theme of "nobody who had Cale as a producer ever wanted to again"?!?

(c.f. Patti Smith, Stooges, Modern Lovers)

also squeeze!

"When we worked with John Cale in the studio, he threw out all the songs that we had written" lol

also Happy Mondays

who apparently got mad that they were paying for Cale to just listen to their guitarist playing in the booth over and over bcz he couldn’t figure out what the untrained musician was doing to get his sound

i just got that Pen15 thing last week. i saw the name of the show online and it dawned on me. i guess they didn't do that where i grew up. or it was so secret that i never heard about it. okay, i looked up the actual origin. i don't remember that prank. anyway, i had no idea why the show was named that until last week.

you know, scott, you really RAQT

welcome to the pen15 club, scott

i'm not really a shows person but that one is hilarious imo

That this exists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNfy3Urhtsc

"nobody who had Cale as a producer ever wanted to again"

Except Nico! Though who knows if she "wanted to" or had to put up with him.

And vice-versa.

God knows she uttered at least two withering putdowns about Lou I won't quote right now, will leave it for sometone else like Tom D.

There's a story from her last sessions with him, about Cale riding her back like a saddle, making horse-racing commentary as she crawled around on all fours.

Almost forgot about that one.

Never heard of that one tbh.

A titmouse is just a tit and not some sort of mouse

OK, you and me both.

townies

Townies are tits

Charming.

Mike Seeger is Pete Seeger's half-brother, not his son

ok so i dug a bit deeper into the titmouse story -- mainly bcz i wanted to post "read some effing potter (beatrix)", and it turns out that

(a) the book called "the adventures of tommy titmouse" (1940) (which if we judge it by its cover is about a bird) is by REGINALD HARRISON
https://stellabooks.com/storage/images/stock/1320/1320452.JPG

(b) the book called "the life and adventures of thomas titmouse and other stories" (1855) is by PETER PARLEY (sounds made up*; story seems to be tristram shandy for kids)
https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/30258253523_3.jpg

(c) and the book called "the adventures of tommy titmouse" (1910) (by potter, beatrix) is indeed about a MOUSE (of course BP was also a townie, at least until she became a hill-country sheep farmer)
https://www.jonkers.co.uk/uploads/00072/00072253.jpg

*pseudonym for samuel griswold goodrich, author, scientist, senator, dianosaur reconstructor

oh fvck it, potter's book is called THE TALE OF MRS TITTLEMOUSE (per the cover obv)

apparently the word tomtit (applies to various birds) is a shortening of "tom titmouse" and the correct plural is "titmouses"

no

verb - titmousar

yo - titmouso
tu - titmousas
usted - titmousa
nostoros - titmousamos
vosotros - titmousais
ustedes - titmousan

Where does Abi Titmuss fit into all this?

she's a folk figure like the rest

That the moral panic about female infanticide in China was around much earlier than I thought. Also That the one child policy there came in later.
I just came across it being a topic of discussion in the Nellie Boy book I picked up last week background to her appearance in beginning to write. I think part of an article she responded to which is about 1880. & there had been rumours of female infanticide for a few centuries beforehand.
One child policy only came in in 1978

The plural of sphinx is sphinges - though sphinxes is also correct.

I listened to a lot of music when my English was still developing and as a result I now sometimes have "oh THAT'S what that means" moment. Most recent example is "and man that was all she wrote" from Springsteen's "The River" - I used to think she'd written the guy a letter announcing her pregnancy.

Pretty sure I knew this but I've just been reminded of it and it caught me by surprise somewhat:

John 19:30
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

Another one. The phrase "on your tod", meaning "on your own", is rhyming slang, from "on your Tod Sloan" (an American jockey apparently)

I just found out that Olivia Newton-John was the cousin of Henry Cow's Georgina Born, but this fascinating fact seems to have been mentioned on this very thread not long ago.

Another Cow factoid - not only is Fred Frith the brother of critic Simon Frith (which I knew), he's also called Jeremy and Fred is but a nickname (which I didn't).

The plural of sphinx is sphinges - though sphinxes is also correct.

The great "aha!" for me here re Greek/Latin/etc, when I studied some of it back in the day, was to grok that despite what is the convention in dictionaries of our familiar Western languages, the nominative case is not the basic or default stem that other varieties are inflected from, but itself a derived form with its own case ending, that ending being -s. We think "Rex" is King, as a kind of irreducible thing! but it is "reg..." (with a long "eeeh") that is the thing, and ALL cases had endings added on, such as reeehgis (spelt "regis") in the genitive, reeehgem (spelt "regem") in the accusative, and reeehgs (the expected "regs" parsimoniously spelt "rex") in the nominative.

In Old Norse, where the nominative -s was -r, the word for "man" is really "mann...", but generations of Norwegians have learnt in school that "man" in Old Norse is "maðr", since that is the nominative case, somehow making the other cases (manns, manni, mann) seem irregular (this even thought the modern Scandinavian is "mann"). The fact is of course that the n's of "mannr" are easily lazed into a fluffy dental ð sound.