Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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

i did not learn until today that my mom wrote a chapter in the original Our Bodies, Ourselves ??!

Wow!

omg tracer!

It was when it was still a handmade packet called “Women And Their Bodies” lol. She had absolutely zero medical training but she pointed out that there was no chapter on what was then called VD and they were like “ok do you want to write it?” and she’s like okay

Interesting!

I was once contracted to edit and publish a history book on women's health for the U.S. government. Unfortunately this happened to be the year 2000. By the time it was to be published in 2001, a new presidential administration (hi, George Bush, hi Tommy Thompson) directed us to cut out content deemed controversial, which meant nothing about birth control, abortion, or (eek) lesbians.

The book shrank by half.

I read Lol Tolhurst talking about Hulme in Manchester and found out how bad the place was as residential area. I think I came across it about 10 years after he did and it was squats, artist residence etc. So I had a nostalgic image of it when it sounds like it was hellish for a family to be moved there.

Just realized chevron (the shape) is related to goat (the animal). Because of the horns.

Cf. Chevre, goat cheese.

Further adventures in pronounciation discovered at a shockingly old age: it's pronounced Laura Nee-ro, not Nye-ro. Hate it when that happens.

Oh wow

Like gyro