Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Sorta depends on whether you were the receptionist at Harrison's NHS clinic at the time

that if you whisper instrux to alexa it whispers back, which made me actual laugh

watching "yeast" and there's a particular scene where i'm going "naaaaah, that can't be those directors even at the year that film was made!" but i was wrong!

Ludo isn't called Ludo in the US.

Parcheesi, baby. That's totally one of those things I've only heard of in movies/books. Never actually seen it or played it myself.

in Canton, Ohio, it is referred to as Ludo Shuffle

I had never heard of it referred to as Ludo until today.

Woah, just connected that with "ludus" as the term for a gladiator school. Cf. Spartacus.

Parcheesi is a corruption of Pachisi, iirc; it was marketed as "the royal game of India"

It literally means "I play" in Latin.

ludicris

"ludicrous" is from the same root, yes (meaning "a form of amusement").

If anything. it would make more sense if the game was called Parcheesi in the UK than the US, given that we would presumably have first encountered it during the Raj.

Thought maybe Ludo was originally a brand name, and this does appear to be the case: it was patented under that name here in 1896. When I was a kid I had a version called Hopalong Ludo, where if you landed on the same square as your opponent, you put your counter atop theirs, then they had to give your counter a ride once it was their turn. Can't recall who won if you reached the finish in this situation though: maybe the game was then tied?

Favourite international name for the game is the German one: Mensch ärgere Dich nicht (Man, Don't Get Angry)!

Best derivative of the Latin 'ludo' - the extinct flying reptile LUDODACTYLUS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludodactylus

to be clear i am angry that i am being made to play the game LUDO (1896), literally and by far the world's most boring board game even in the hopalong variant

that the nintendo racing game F-Zero is a pun on the formula racing nomenclature that I somehow missed, F-Zero being F1 but "one louder"

xp Ludo boring? Maybe so, but it wasn't the game that adults point-blank refused to play with me when I was a kid, that would be SNAKES & LADDERS (also Indian, originally) which I think was so despised because it was too much like life - they were probably all thinking of the times they'd been dealt a metaphorical snake on square 99.

Today I learned: monkfish is a kind of anglerfish, with a little fish-duping/-dooming lure and everything.

Although puppeteer Kermit Love worked on Sesame Street, Kermit the Frog isn't named after him!

Found out yesterday that Lord Shaftesbury was a significant early Christian Zionist. Think I'd thought of him more positively until then.but as a prominent English Victorian he's bound to be well dodge. Even with the altruism.

Reminds me of the alternative title for The Glass Bead Game, which was Magister Ludi, which I think means "Master of the Game."

Maybe I just forgot but today I learned that David Lowery was also the singer in Cracker.

which of his other jobs do you know him from, because…

camper van b

yeah, CVB

xp yeah monkfish are enormous and hideous and delicious

Poor man's lobster, as it was sometimes called. Maybe still is.

ha just about wrote that

I was reading Asterix in Britain with my daughter and realised, in the section where Obelix shakes Anticlimax by the hand too violently, his injury is not, in fact, a weirdly inflamed crotch, but just a knee drawn from a weird perspective.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/0c/13/200c13c686c33ae21fcf521895a946e7.jpg

That The Weeknd's "I Feel It Coming" was co-written and produced by Daft Punk. I've heard it played by random Dutch dj's at corporate events I've worked at in the past year - a man's gotta pay the rent - and grown to really love the damned song.

Siskel and Ebert were apparently not given film clips by the studios, at the screening they had to hustle and identify what clips they wanted and what reels they were on, then quickly transfer copies of the scenes to video on their own, at the show's expense, before the (pre-digital, of course) screener got sent back to the studios. It's mind-boggling to consider movie studios ever allowing anything close to that, but reportedly that's how it went for years.

I just learned that recently also! From a friend who had just read the new behind-the-scenes account, Opposable Thumbs, by Matt Singer. It sounds like a great read.

The Council of Trent took place in Trento, Italy, and had nothing to do with the River Trent.

Lad testing by Sandoz included testing toxicity on elephants. One died in minutes according to Albert Hoffman in LSD My Problem child. He doesn't say much more at that point other than toxicity level 0.06mg/kg which he'd had to work out per weight of the elephant.
Like are elephants so common in Swiss society in the 1940s that you can use them as test animals. Are vegans ok taking acid if it was initially tested on animals. Acid is toxic in doses of fractions of a gram,elephant given 0.297g.
Hadn't realised it was toxic so wonder what lab accidents have caused.
Mind like blown

I think the Hoffman memoir turned up in the bibliography of Bear the Owsley Stanley biography. It gets quite technical or chemical in places.

The Council of Trent took place in Trento, Italy, and had nothing to do with the River Trent.

wait till you hear about the Diet of Worms.

comment I was making was about LSD testing I corrected an autocorrect and obviously missed a 2nd one.

Hoffman just talks about toxic level used on elephant without giving further details as to when and where butfiggure he's talking about is also true of Tusko an elephant experimented on in the US in 1962 to research a phenomena called musth, more on that here https://www.illinoisscience.org/blog/lsd-and-the-elephant/

Hoffman was running through some statistics related to animal tests it appeared he had made when he started talking about this elephant without giving further background.
Book is pretty interesting.

using an elephant as a demonstration was some weird thing for a number of years! I guess if something can kill an animal that large, think about what it could do to you

I believe Edison used an elephant to demonstrate how his alternating current, which he had patented and wanted to roll out (and make $$) as a power grid was demonstrated as safe compared to the bad and dangerous direct current, which they used to kill an elephant in a public demonstration

Often times in TV/books/movies/etc writers invoke "strong enough to kill a horse," which imo for some reason sounds less horrific than elephant.

xp It was the other way around, Edison was a proponent of DC (despite evidence that AC was a better alternative). In any event, the execution of Topsy the elephant was organized by the publicist of Luna Park. The "war of the currents" was earlier, and Edison was tangentially involved in promoting "dangerous" AC as a good way to execute prisoners.

whoops. thanks for the correction

The only reason that's fresh in my mind is that I just listened to a book on the topic of the "war of the currents." It was truly bizarre, and the execution of the elephant was horrific--although it was a successful film (produced by the Edison Company) in kinetoscope arcades for years afterwards.

a shockingly old tale

I only know about the whole Tesla/Edison/Topsy thing because of Bob's Burgers, rather embarrassingly.

An elephant is a dreadful thing to waste so surprised people can think they have them to spare.
Really odd that Hoffman gives no background other than numerical statistic.
Aren't they supposed to be intelligent creatures like whales are. Which gives a further reason not to just waste them.

that there's a real place called Penzance, and it's in England. i just thought it was what a weirdo lite opera man would make up as a name for some pirates to be from

It's in Cornwall. Which I think was at one point a separate people. I still never made it there. I think I was just about to head down to the Elephant Fayre when I got invited on my first trip to Ireland.
Yeah thinking how many lifts I could do it in hitching.

Must have 2 festivals confused was it the goat fair? Looks like Elephant Fayre ended in 1986 not 90.

Tarantara

Turns out that not only is Talia Shire Francis Ford Coppola's sister, she's also Jason Schwartzmann's mother! I honestly don't have a clear picture of the Coppola acting dynasty in my head, it seems to encompass most of Hollywood.

lol I just learned that two days ago, my friend told me

And Nic Cage is Coppola's nephew!

that one i did know