Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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

I was pretty close to thirty when I was told that "prevalent" is not pronounced pree-VAY-lent.

probably some slippage with "prevailing" no?

I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, probably.

re HAZCHEM, we have HAZMAT around here, and i only figured it out in recent times

pleasant plains, ai lien has a coworker who is black and who claims that the black community calls it lipps incorporated. he was unmoved when she told him about the pun.

I probably would have "gotten" Lipps Inc sooner had I actually heard someone utter their name out loud. They tend not to be talked about a lot, shockingly.

(i never got it until right now)

that 'broadway' was shorthand for a bunch of separately owned theaters rather than a single entity like disneyland or something

that causal ≠ casual

I DID NOT KNOW THAT ABOUT OLIVES

I've been listening to the soundtrack to the 1962 John Huston film Freud: The Secret Passion, not a film I'd even heard of before, and it sounded really familiar so I looked it up and apparently Jerry Goldsmith later recycled lots of it on the soundtrack to Alien.

i’ve heard “pulling mussels from the shell” a million times in forty whatever years, and the words after “maid marian” are “in her tip-toed feet” which is like, i slurred nonsense for that long— over THAT? wtf is that?!?

but also i’m glad to know before i possibly never hear it again.

...apparently Jerry Goldsmith later recycled lots of it on the soundtrack to Alien

Word is the editor on Alien used the Freud music as a temp track, Ridley fell in love with it and used it, much to Goldsmith's chagrin.

xposts: i think i remember reading somewhere that the main character in the gadfly was actually based on reilly... also shostakovich's hamlet score rules!

Indiana Jones and his dad both had relations with the Nazi chick in the Last Crusade.

xposts: i think i remember reading somewhere that the main character in the gadfly was actually based on reilly... also shostakovich's hamlet score rules!

Jack Peñate is Mervyn Peake's grandson

That Jack Peñate has extensive songwriting credits on several Sault albums.

Not shocking at all, but since this is the default trivia thread:

The phrase "a go go" comes from legendary venue Whiskey A Go Go; the venue, however, took its name from the French title for Ealing comedy Whiskey Galore.

Fub fact l, Mervyn Peake was also a graphic artist, and designed the logo for Pan Books. They offered him either a one-time flat fee of £10, or a royalty of one farthing per book sold.

Peake's friend Graham Greene told him that paperback books were a passing fad that wouldn't catch on. Peake, who badly needed money, took the £10.

Pan Books went on to publish the James Bond books, which sold 27 million paperbacks.

Yikes, that’s £28000 he missed out on, or around half a mil accounting for inflation. Thanks, Graham.

"Fub fact"? Gah.

Pub fact?

That Paul's grandad in "A Hard Day's Night", played by Wilfrid Brambell, routinely being described as "very clean" was a reference to Brambell's performance as Albert Steptoe in "Steptoe and Son", where he is routinely described as a "dirty old man".

"Three Wheels on My Wagon" is a Burt Bacharach composition.

l learned that when we did the Bacharach poll and it blew my mind then

When people mention "Hades" they aren't necessarily referring to the underworld in Greek mythology; there's a thriving Christian belief in Hades that I was unaware of before tonight.

whoa that’s news to me too, thx

"Generation Jones" is related to "Keeping up with the Joneses"

But probably not "Basketball Jones"

Nothing shocking in not knowing but I learnt that:
- Days on Earth are technically getting longer. In 200M years or so, a day will be 25 hours. And it used to be 18 hours.
- Due to the gravity of the moon. And bulging equators. It's sort of scraping our rotation and delaying it a few milliseconds per year, and in return (conservation of energy) the earth transfers momentum to the moon and pushes it away.
- Which also applies to us relative to the sun. One day, in an impossibly late future, Earth would become tidally locked with the sun, and only be lighted on one face.
- The moon is already locked to us, but in an even more distant future, we will be interlocked, and the moon will just be fixed in the sky and never move (it would still wax and wane though).
- If the reverse was true and the moon was rotating faster than the planet, then the moon would potentially crash into the planet or form a ring, which is the scenario for Phobos on Mars (scary isn't it) or Triton on Neptune.
- Another scenario is Io, whose surface is constantly being torn apart by Jupiter's massive gravity, and whose tides have turned Io into a magma world, with the help of the other two moons. In the case of Enceladus around Saturn, the tides heat up the ocean, enough for geysers to shoot water up through the ice into space, which is possible because of low escape velocity on a 500 km wide world, and offered Cassini direct samples when it flew over. That hydrothermal ocean is roughly 4 times the Mediterranean sea in volume.