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

This looks like a job for... the Folklorist

Who feeds pigs roast beef, anyhow? The whole thing is absurd on its face

Pigs are pretty omnivorous, yeah? Hence the stories of unlucky farmers being eaten by their hogs

Yeah and why everyone freaked out when Dorothy fell into the hog pen at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz

^ that scene instantly sprang to my mind, too

dorothies gotta watch out for them hungry pigs

Always makes me think of the Muriel McKay abduction and murder.

> Finisterre = finis terre = land's end
> ― koogs, Thursday, 3 November 2022 20:34

Mediterranean - middle of the earth

The Rush song "Cinderella Man" is basically a retelling of the plot of Frank Capra's 1936 film Mr Deeds Goes to Town rather than an original work. Also, that same film popularised the term 'doodling'. It also introduced the term 'pixelated', which has pretty much the same meaning as 'away with the fairies', but unfortunately it didn't catch on in the same way.

I don't remember the movie, but isn't the word they're using "pixilated"?

Sorry yes pixilated, got carried away there. It's very discombobulating to hear someone say it from the 1930s!

So when driving about the mid-atlantic I have spent time in/near Mount Airy, Maryland as well as Mount Airy, North Carolina. A mild curiosity but not really that much weirder than having multiple Springfields or whatever.

I knew that the Andy Griffith Show was set in Mayberry, North Carolina. It is just faintly possible that I had read that Andy Griffith was from North Carolina but I did not know where. It was, in fact, Mount Airy.

Today's realization:

May | berr | y

Mount | Air | y

that Kira Roessler of Black Flag bassist fame has won Emmys & an Oscar for sound editing, worked on huge Hollywood films like Joker and Man Of Steel etc

yeah but she was also in Black Flag so it's not all bad

(she did the sound editing for Mad Max: Fury Road so thats the real highlight)

"The service was obtained by dialling the letters TIM (846) on a dial telephone"

(one of tom stoppard's plays has the speaking clock in it)

xp Wasn’t Roessler also married to Mike Watt?

Yes.

Joker was directed by the guy who did the GG Allin documentary! It all comes back to punk rock in the end.

might have inspired him to shit all over himself with Folie à Deux

Joker was directed by the guy who did the GG Allin documentary! It all comes back to punk rock in the end.

Buncha sell-outs, you mean!

(she did the sound editing for Mad Max: Fury Road so thats the real highlight)

That's the one she got an Oscar for.

Gil Scott-Heron did the voiceover on the old Tango ads? https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/nov/17/perforated-eardrums-how-we-made-the-tango-ads-gil-scott-heron

it's amazing how often i will stumble on a mind-altering discovery, thinking to myself that i must share this next time the "shockingly old" thread is bumped, and then it's bumped and i can't remember what was so amazing. i guess emphasis is on the "shockingly old"

Mama Cass and Keith Moon died in the same bedroom, four years apart.

Wasn’t Roessler also married to Mike Watt?

Also in the band Dos together

I just got off the phone with an old friend and they basically introduced me into the world of the Ron Perlman-helmed “Beauty and the Beast”. For the longest time I’d just assumed it was a made-for-TV movie and not an actual show that went on for 3 seasons!

https://i.postimg.cc/RVkNwPXt/bafkreicxmfdoza2lqo6sjc6y2o42hkah5rhihef7w3jjoynltmxzlkcara.jpg

George RR Martin wrote 14 episodes of that show

(back when he had a work ethic)

Kira Roessler also has a brother that was in The Screamers among other bands.

She was in Black Flag when I saw them in 84. The Marquee gig that went onto be the live set I've played more than any other.

I heard that Greg Ginn insisted on writing the basslines she played. Not been able to see how that worked if the band had hours long rehearsal jams almost daily. Would think she would be improvising her own.