Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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.

hows it pron in USA?

Well I guess it must be different, if people are having problems hearing it? Dunno.

I didn't even know it was her real name, tho.

wasn't, rather

I knew someone who, if my friend is to believed, is said to have uttered at age 18 "wait, you can't get pregnant if your clothes are on, right" while making out.

'Shore' rhymes with 'oar'. 'Shaw' is the same as the first three letters in 'shopping' xp

i'm loving this thread. so many discoveries!

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

― Øystein, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 1:59 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

http://www.noonco.com/flea/movie.htm

My flabber hasn't been gasted quite like this in a long time :-/

xp I only got that Sandie Shaw pun because I once attended a seminar about legal practice given by an English professor who made a big thing out of the difference between 'law' and 'lore'. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about

Wait - how the hell DOES a candle work?!

I know, right?!!??!

i too only figured out lipps, inc. lately. also, fear's lee ving. it never occurred to me until i was driving in the car one day and bam.

I just now got Lipps, Inc. I say in my head "Lipps Incorporated" whenever I read that.

I was pretty close to thirty when I was told that "prevalent" is not pronounced pree-VAY-lent. I liked my version better. "The PREE-VAY-LENT opinion in this country is that Barack Obama will be a force of change."

I didn't realize until sometime in my sophomore year of high school that being forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson (Focus on the Family) every morning on the way to school was completely fucked up. My dad used to drive me to school everyday for years, and that shit was always on the radio.

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

― Cittaslow Mazza (blueski), Wednesday, 12 November 2008"

haha yes, i thought it must be turkish

Did she ever break with him?

I indeed jumped the gun there:

https://people.com/diane-keaton-complicated-history-with-woody-allen-he-is-extremely-distraught-exclusive-11828652

I thought tombot's post was an answer to budo's and my brain was fritzing a bit.

That the Shure brand of microphones was started by a man named Shure, and not a creative spelling of “sure”.

Wait till you hear about Adolphe Sax

The inventor of the Adolphaphone

More a case of "things I was shockingly old when I didn't learn", but I remember seeing the name More O'Ferrall on billboards many years ago and wondering if it was a terrible pun on "more overall".

For some reason this bugged me earlier today, because I had some spicy food yesterday and a bout of indigestion, so I decided to Google the company, but despite it being a major player in the UK advertising landscape since 1936 there's almost nothing about it on the internet.

In 2002 it was rebranded as Clear Channel, in 1969 it teamed up with Adshel to put adverts inside bus shelters. George More O'Ferrall was a director and producer but seems to have had nothing to do with the company. Francis More O'Ferrall, a relative, was the chairman of the now-dormant Anglo-Irish Bloodstock Agency. About the only substantive thing I can find about More O'Ferrall is that it was founded by a relative of the aforementioned called Rory:
https://sites.google.com/site/kildangangaakildare/TimesPast/more-o-ferrall-park

Who is also related to another Rory More O'Ferrall who worked at De Beers after the war. It's a vaguely interesting example of how a company with huge reach and leave only a tiny footprint. Indeed the Angle-Irish Bloodstock Agency comes across as one of those things that you'd only ever think about if you bred horses, and in a certain segment of society it probably looms large, but for the rest of us it's a weirdly-named oddity.

Imagine being a weirdly-named oddity!

All I know is that they are referenced in Mate of the Bloke by Half Man Half Biscuit. I never really thought any further about them and didn't realise they were now Clear Channel.

The duration of yellow traffic lights changes relative to the speed limit.

Drew Struzan, the artist famous for painting movie posters throughout the 1970s and 1980s, also painted the cover to Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71BWSK1HuxL._SL1425_.jpg

i never noticed how much it looks like a female reproductive system

!

until this week i thought all emblematic skull and crossbones cartoons were jolly roger pirate shit and i feel like the kind of history fan that would fuckin know this nazi shit.

re telling the bees that wikipedia page does not mention that it appears to have MAYAN origins. in mexico, at the museum of chocolate, i ran across an info panel (with an english translation) that said:

The Mayas normally keep melipona bees in trunks that are hung from the roofs of their houses. They believe that when a person who has bee colonies dies, these will leave unless the heirs immediately advise them of the death. According to them, the bees need to know that there will be someone to take care of them. It is also believed that if the beekeeper goes to a cemetery, he shouldn't visit the colonies for a period of three weeks, as he could carry the sadness of the cemetery with him.

I was about to say something about bee-related superstition and remembered that when infected by the parasite Apocephalus borealis, bees can start behaving oddly, rather like... zom-bees

Booooo

Sorry typing on phone

Beeeee

i've suddenly had the horrible thought that the people putting this museum together might have done some kind of AI bullshit to create this panel and conflated what Wikipedia very clearly says is a Western European practice with other Mayan traditions

I didn't realize all the younger Skarsgård actors are all Stellan's sons

So I've been following the story of the demolition of the east wing of the white house, and I keep wondering why we don't see pictures of what it looks like head-on because surely it must look crazy for the white house to be half demolished. I'm poking around on the internet to see what I can find and I come across an overhead rendering of it and realize that after all these years I didn't really get that the west wing and east wing were separate buildings connected by long passageways that you rarely see in photos because they are mostly obscured by trees. I always thought they were just the left and right hand side of the main building that you see in most pictures. This includes having been directly across the street from the white house a couple of different times over the years.

When I think of the White House the first image that comes to mind is the scene in Independence Day where it gets blown up. And, yes, the sides are obscured by trees in that film. Although admittedly it was a model, but I have 100% faith the Roland Emmerich did his research, because if you can't trust Roland Emmerich, who can you trust:
https://i.redd.it/whg5g8iocne91.jpg

I'm old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan struck a blow for freedom by removing Jimmy Carter's solar panels, although they were apparently installed on the roof of the West Wing. I learn from Wikipedia that Carter hoped they would still be there in the year 2000. He had a plan to have 20% of the USA's energy needs met by renewable energy circa 2000.

This did not happen, and if anything I remember the turn of the millennium as the high point of the Hummer, the Dodge Viper, and the Ford Excursion, which was dubbed the "Ford Valdez" by the Club of Rome, who were probably jealous communists, and in retrospect it looks surprisingly conservative compared to what came after.

What 67 means

Drew Struzan, the artist famous for painting movie posters throughout the 1970s and 1980s, also painted the cover to Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

post black sabbath album art done in a busy/claustrophobic demonic caricature style from the 70s and 80s

Bruno Walter and Gustav Mahler were friends. Walter made stereo recordings in the LP era, and I think of Mahler more or less as a "nineteenth-century" composer, so I never really thought of them as overlapping. But Walter was only 16 years younger than Mahler.

Also many of Mahler’s symphonies has their premier in the 20th Century.

If your favourite team is involved, World Series games are considerably less stressful than league championship games. I had not yet formulated this thought in 1992 or 1993.

. . . says a guy whose team just won

That's the truth, though; when they were down the first few innings tonight, didn't feel nearly as stressed as the ALCS (didn't feel stressed at all). I wrote about all the that on the ALCS thread--getting here for me was the thing, and the season is a success no matter what happens now.