Things you were shockingly old when you learned

which is funny because the modern burrito is not a small meal. Still small compared to an actual burro, though.

it's called that because the burrito transports the ingredients like a donkey hauls goods ...

"taco" means "wad"

Huh. I am pretty fluent in Spanish, and I always assumed the word came from tacón, which means "heel." This made sense to me, as the shape of the folded tortilla is kind of like a shoe or boot heel.

just figured out, like 2 days ago, that the lyrics are "highway to the danger zone"

(until then, thought they were "I went to to the danger zone")

― homosexual II, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:03 PM (fifteen years ago)

I didn't see this part of the thread until today...

Karel Reisz was one of the children rescued by Nicholas Winton from the Nazis.

So I knew that James Taylor sang on "Back in the High Life Again," but did not know that the lyrics are by Will Jennings and that it was subsequently recorded by Warren Zevon.

Only recently learned that the entire order of carnivora is broken down into the suborders of feliformia and caniformia — cat-animals and dog-animals. This doesn't actually account for all carnivores (bears and others are in other orders), but I hadn't realized that cats and dogs are such a literal binary split in taxonomy. Also how are there not metal bands named feliformia or caniformia?

Oops I take that back, bears actually are caniforms.

Makes sense since Caniformia is The Bear State.

At a minimum Snoop Dogg should make an album called Caniformia.

So I knew that James Taylor sang on "Back in the High Life Again"

Same tune as Steve Winwood?

Yes, Winwoid. Taylor sang harmony and you can kind of hear it. A departure for Winwood, who tended to do everything himself prior to that record.

Steve Winwoid is the New Jersey Steve Winwood

I had no idea until today that Roxette, not Pat Benatar, did “Listen to Your Heart”

I thought you were gonna say Heart.

who tended to do everything himself

except when he was playing in traffic

yet he didn't die

He had blind faith

while there is time

that Be Bop was named after a tune Monk never recorded, original title Bip Bop. Also occasionally known as 52nd Street Theme + Nameless.

Dizzy Gillespie called his memoir To Be Or Not To Bop
pretty good read too.

he also recorded the 52nd Street version of it which from which Monk received sweet fa in royalties. It was tough out there for a maverick genius!

Dizzy Gillespie called his memoir To Be Or Not To Bop

major nostalgia bomb, i have memories of sleeping over at a friend's house as a kid and looking at this on the bookshelf in their den and thinking it was a cool title for a book. jazzy family, friend's dad played the tuba, would go down to nyc every year for tuba christmas. thanks for jobbing the ol' memory!

"Rock Around the Clock" was written by Max C. Freedman, who was born in 1893!

that's how clocks work (time not linear)

I always liked the title of Charles Mingus' autobiography, Beneath the Underdog.

My laptop keyboard has a Euro symbol on it, accessible by pressing Ctrl-Alt-4. I'd been pasting it in from the Wikipedia page before I noticed just now, what a dork. Wouldn't surprise me if I said this upthread somewhere and had forgotten, although I'm danged if I'm loading 11,000+ posts to find out.

I find it crazy that, over twenty years down the line, I still need to CTRL + ALT + anything to get a euro symbol when £ and $ are still in prime positions.

pasting it in from the Wikipedia page

I used to do this all the time for various symbols until I discovered the Character Map program (built into Windows)... saves having to go to the internet.

if your keyboard has an Alt Gr key you can probably get a € with that + 4 so only 2 keys instead of 3

€

haha you're right

€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€
€

wtf is a Gr key? I might be this old when I learned of it.

huh, I thought it was called AltGr cos it added grave & other diacritic marks, but google is telling me the Gr stands for graphic? Grrrrrrrrrr

Alt Grrrrrrr

I have never seen this key.

Gr Hongro

i'd guess that every 4-7 years i end up relearning that Stewart Copeland is American

I just learned the other day that Klark Kent charted before the Police did.

shit, I had no idea about Charles Bronson's early life... a Lithuanian Tatar, didn't speak english as a child, worked in coal mines, earned a Purple Heart as a bomber gunner in WWII

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

correction: ^^^^ he spoke English, but not at home

I'm sure all British board members know this already, but I just found out that Grant Shapps is cousin to Mick Jones of The Clash and his brother Andre played in Big Audio Dynamite.

Black sheep of the family or what?

Just because he was in the Clash doesn't make him that bad imo.

Good old Shappsy

that reminds me, I never finished the latest Partridge podcast

I had no idea Magnus Magnusson wrote books and presented TV shows about Vikings and archaeology.

My Canadian partner knew the books and the TV shows but had no idea about Mastermind.

Today I learned who Grant Shapps is. I do love this quote:

He said he had "over-firmly denied" having a second job.

So I was recently looking into the etymology of tempura, which I knew to be a Portuguese loan word into Japanese.

I had read somewhere that it came from the "times" (i.e., Lent) when one ate fish. With cognates like temporary and temporal. Not unusual for Romance languages derived from Latin dialects.

Then I heard the alternate suggestion that it meant "seasoned." With cognates like tempered, temperament, temperature, temperate, temperamental. Moods, flavors, emotions.

Then it hit me that season, seasoning, seasoned... also are related to the time of year, as well as spices and flavors and condiments.

it's pumpkin spice all the way down

premium YMP content like this makes my ILX subscription well worth it

^^ agreed, great post ymp! ^^

Mark s, Fun fact: pumpkin spice originally referred to spices you would put ON pumpkin (nutmeg, clove, cinnamon), but - interestingly - not pumpkin. No one wanted squash in their coffee.

Apparently after some complaints, they added a little bit of actual pumpkin flavoring to it to satisfy those persons who felt pumpkin spice should include pumpkin.

I don't really have strong feelings in the matter but it's moderately interesting. (There is a whole "No Such Thing as a Fish" podcast on this