Things you were shockingly old when you learned

I've got a mac and I still don't know how to do any of, um, ^ those ^

I end up going to wikipedia and copy-and-pasting when I want unusual characters

The cows-and-bulls thing, plus Adam Ant, are the only things on this thread that I do know

how to cook an artichoke properly

(a julia child recipe steered me right)

How to tie my shoes (velcro, you see..)

Didn't realise that Adam Ant was a pun, until a year or so ago.

^^^ this. Same with Sandy Shaw.

Fay Fife of the Rezillos.

(i.e. it's a pun on "I am from the town of Fife, my good fellow" in broad scots)

What's the Adam Ant pun? Adam Ant = adamant? If so... pretty lame pun.

That's it.

xpost Tell that to Lai Mpun, the lead singer of Bangkok's Phleng Chat.

I am 33 and didn't know any of these things. Wait - how the hell DOES a candle work?!

Same with Sandy Shaw.

i don't know how to explain it but i used to think chickens had a really weird way of "mating", something to do with the rooster's legs. (!!?!?) :)

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

"that SHIFT + 6 = ^. I think I figured it out a month or so ago. I always wondered how people got that character."

^^^Dude, you beat me by a month. Thanks!

I once spent a half hour trying to eject a cd from a Mac before someone finally told me there's an eject button on the keyboard. I was going through all these crazy menus and preferences...

I think I was like 16 or 17 when I learned that cows and bulls were the male and female versions of the same animal and not two distinct animals.

What sort of seemingly basic facts did it take you a surprisingly long time for you to learn?

― filthy dylan, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 5:30 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

loooool one of my friends thought this and it was since passed into running joke territory.

I think I've done that Mac eject button thing too :(

Pronounced lapels like 'labels' for years until corrected but happily don't dress well enough to use it often

My girlfriend was shocked to learn, at the age of 33, that a 'Flea Circus' is actually a rather charming mechanical toy, and is in no way operated by any parasitic insects.

Ismael, at the age of 32, is shocked to learn the same thing. This thread is getting embarrassing

WAT! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flea_circus

I thought penguins were as tall as humans until that march of the penguins movie

one of my friends thought this and it was since passed into running joke territory

no but seriously, what is this about?

i mean i can see that there's rarely anything to size them against in the big white antarctic, but why would anyone then automatically think okay here's a bird i could play tag with

u could still play tag w/it tho

But you could make the same assumption with ostriches in the big yellow desert (or wherever they live), and in that case you'd be right!

I'm still in touch with several grown adults who genuinely believe there's 'something' to supernatural claims about ouija boards, despite its fairly obvious origins in parlour games / illusions which utilised the (admittedly fucking spooky) ideomotor effect.

aw no-one said 'where babies come from'

I've had a lot of experiences in my adult life with mispronouncing words I understood as part of written text, but hadn't heard aurally in the context of conversation etc. For example, I was well into my twenties before I knew the word "vehement" wasn't pronounced veh-hee-ment. I wish others would politely correct you when you do that instead of letting you blindly sound like an idiot.

I'm a bit like that, but now I'm in the habit of saying works incorrectly, I can't get out of it. Canal is not pronounced can-el, but there's fuck all I can do about it now.

^ This happens to me all the time too - so much so that I actually now find it quite amusing when I realise, midway through a sentence, that a word I've never heard before is looming at the end. I suppose that people who talk a lot, rather than reading, must find the same with spelling. It only annoys me when some moron uses it as an opportunity to score cheap points (sadly fairly often)

I was going to start a thread like this, but it was going to be more about 'life lessons' that took you forever to learn, rather than trivia.

Anyway it's taken me this long to fully realize how unreliable first impressions can be when it comes to people.

but why would anyone then automatically think okay here's a bird i could play tag with

haha

TAL have an episode on this in the "best of" section on their wesite. people who thought unicorns were real, etc., lots of awkward silences at cocktail parties: good stuff.

i like to tag birds. (runs)

There's a penguin here and he wants to say "you didn't touch me ner ner ner"

I thought penguins went "weh weh weh"

I'm still in touch with several grown adults who genuinely believe there's 'something' to supernatural claims about ouija boards, despite its fairly obvious origins in parlour games / illusions which utilised the (admittedly fucking spooky) ideomotor effect.

― Huey in Bristol (Huey in Melbourne), Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:08 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you couldnt get me in the same room as a ouija board

I was about 35 when I figured out Open Sesame = Open Says Me.

i used to think HAZCHEM was a foreign word for danger like Achtung

I 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")

ooh i like that

lol mandee those are even better

Nothing, as I'm not shockingly old.

Misheard lyrics are always better. The singer of my old band had this (intentionally) corny line that went "sleep all day til the telephone ring / head to the bar and shake that thing", the latter half of which I always thought was "head to the barber and shave that thing".

My friend always thought that Op Ivy song Take Warning went "skate boarding", which is way better.

Same with Sandy Shaw.

Ok I sounded this out several times in several different ways and I still don't get how this is a pun. Help?

I think that 'Shaw' is meant to sound like 'shore' - I don't hear it either

Sandy Shore.

Shaw is pronounced exactly the same as Shore, in England.

Deadpan humor works best if you're a cold fish.

I was a university student when I first found out the German sense of humor is very regional. There's an entire subset of the country where they seem very serious, and when they're being funny, they sound *even more* serious. It's a decent bit.

That would be North Germany, right? The NDR TV series 'Der Tatortreiniger', set in Hamburg and later adapted by Greg Davies into BBC1's 'The Cleaner', is a good example of this. It reminds me a lot of the West Midlands deadpan humour mined by Stewart Lee (among others).

I'd never heard of these extremely cute traditions.

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

Grandma Moses' surname was actually Moses.

I just thought they called her that because she was old as shit.

I've only just found out that a mule is the hybrid offspring of a donkey and a horse, and, with the exception of some historical anomalies, cannot reproduce themselves.

Chiroptera— the family of bats— are 1/5 of all mammal species and perhaps 1/4 of the total population of mammals. This seems obviously ridiculous and must be untrue. But apparently it is true?

Apparently it's much more than a 1/4:

The global biomass of wild mammals

Bats (Chiroptera), for example, comprise one-fifth of species and two-thirds in terms of individual mammals, but only contribute less than one-tenth of the total biomass of wild land mammals, as shown in Fig. 2.

(And yeah this seems a remarkable fact, one that i had no idea about.)

Though including humans would give that 1/4 figure i guess.

obligatory post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8Ygt_t69A

i love that there are scientific studies to answer the question, "What if we weighed on the animals?"

was coming to post that i never knew David Crosby was in Les Baxter's Balladeers

xp *weighed ALL the animals

... sorry

What was David Crosby's biomass percentage in Les Baxters' Balladeers?

'how many divisions do the bats have?'

- stalin

I am so tempted to poll songs feat. bats

this poll might already exist since 25% of all songs are secretly or obv about bats— more you know

There are probably a lot of bat songs that we just don't know about because they are too high to hear

excellent point, no wonder they so underrated

Time for a reassessment of Meat Loaf

As long as I don’t have to listen to the Aquabats ever again

haha there's a name I haven't heard in a while

During my old commute I would not infrequently be driving behind this dude with a frickin black and white painted Aquabats themed car, with license plate AQUABOY

wow, a superfan of one of the most annoying bands ever. there is hope for all us i guess

https://sheathcleaning.co.uk/

aquabats. i had a friend in high school who was a fan though i don't think i managed to hear a note of them. i found said friend on facebook recently and they're trans! not making any categorical statement about aquabats or transness in this post.

"https://sheathcleaning.co.uk/"

Well, you learn something every day. I now know that a bean is a hardened lump of horse smegma. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "full of beans".

There's a synthesiser manufacturer called Polyend. They're based in Poland. This has nothing to do with horse smegma, by the way. It's a completely new topic. I should have made that clear.

Moving swiftly on, there's a synthesiser manufacturer called Polyend. They're based in Poland. Polyend. Poland. It wasn't until I spoke the name out loud that I realised it was supposed to sound like Poland. That is a thing that I was shockingly old when I learned it.

Well, you learn something every day. I now know that a bean is a hardened lump of horse smegma

Including stuff you'd rather not learn.

I've just this second realised that "flyover states" are not just states that have a lot of flyovers.

more like fly at u states

I always thought the Aquabats gimmick of dressing up like henchmen from '67 Batman was pretty sweet, just disappointing they didn't change their look up every few years, seems like a lotta possibilities there

The word “folklore” only goes back to the 1840s. I guess it makes sense that it would arise around the same time as early nationalism, but still.

The other day I learned that Bill Murray played Johnny Storm in a radio show performance of the Fantastic Four in 1975.

Mark and Carol Thatcher are twins.

It is considered bad luck to say 'rat' on the Isle of Man.

That follows on neatly from the post about Mark Thatcher.

xp had to go look that up:

On the Isle of Man, longtail is a euphemism used to denote a rat, as a relatively modern superstition has arisen that it is considered bad luck to mention this word. The origins of this superstition date to sea-taboos, where certain words and practices were not mentioned aboard ship, for fear of attracting bad luck (or bad weather).[1]

Cf.: the word "bear" just means "the brown one" allegedly out of superstition that if you say the actual word for bear, you will unintentionally summon a bear, who will intentionally eat your face.

So (the story goes) no one knows the original name of the bear, which makes it therefore especially frightening and mystical.

Variant: the wizard guy, and the z-word https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord

That reminds me of the theory, which I think you will appreciate YMP, that the works of William Shakespeare were in fact written by an entirely different man, also named William Shakespeare

Oh that's new to me. What a coincidence! "Of the Lancashire Shakespeares, not those upstarts in Stratford."

OTOH I feel like there's a Back to the Future Marvin Berry scenario in there.

"Deareft Williame: 'Tis I, your cousin, Goforth Mercy Shakespere. I knoweth thou looketh forre a NEW verse meter for thine Historicall Tragedyes. Well, verily, here be a DOPE new sound which SLAMMETH..."

That rat thing reminds me of the whistling on ships superstition which I honestly only learned about in too-recent years! I think via some comment on a TV show.

I FINALLY looked up how stereo signal information is encoded on vinyl. I spent 40+ years thinking the needle just sat in the groove bouncing from left to right, never considering it could also be allowed to move up and down (without jumping out of the groove).