Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Today I realized that the phrase "follow suit" derives from playing cards.

Mad Magazine coined “Porky Parcheesi”

sardines are young pilchards

for years my company capped Canada office's hours at 37.5/week as opposed to 40/week in the US, so I mistakenly assumed this was due to Canada laws and that overtime was received if you went over 37.5/week.

found out today it was just due to a dumb HR policy in Canada that they only get to work that many hours.

this is why we google

Parchment is skin

wait’ll you hear about Soylent Green

The boy whose voice you hear saying "look mummy, there's an aeroplane up in the sky" on Pink Floyd’s Goodbye Blue Sky is Roger Waters son.

Intriguing. So many of those spoken bits have become (perhaps overly) storied. Like the Abbey Road janitor saying "I'm not frightened of dying" or whatever.

The dad in Family Ties is the gun nut in Tremors

And a sexual harasser guest star on a memorable episode of Night Court.

that there actually really memorable eps of Night Court? i guess i remember roz saying “3 to beat your face into a paste-y dough.” otherwize it’s just vibes.

I remember Bull thought he was pregnant on one episode? Probably didn’t age well :-/

maybe it was this one, he just takes care of a baby

https://nightcourt.fandom.com/wiki/Bull%27s_Baby

TIL that teh Britishes have a special usage of the phrase “get stuck in.”

what’s the other usage??

something like, these boots have a tendency to get stuck in mud...maybe?

oh i thought James Redd meant like an idiom

my partner and I binge-watched Monty Don's "Big Dreams, Small Spaces" in 2019 and "get stuck in" permanently entered our American vocabulary.

Cambridge Dictionary has it as "to start doing something enthusiastically." I don't think I have ever heard it used in that sense.

In U.S. English, I think it would mean nearly the opposite, or at least the phrase "get stuck" would, e.g., "I got stuck with doing the dishes" or "I got stuck in dealing with these asshole customers and was late to dinner."

so a bit like diving in, digging in, or immersing oneself

and likely unrelated, but phonically reminiscent of how a british person might talk about "tucking into" some food -- which always conjures for me a gleeful expression of anticipation before the act of eating, lol

or perhaps a guilty one idk

I've always associated that phrase with someone tucking a napkin into their collar before eating.

In U.S. English, I think it would mean nearly the opposite, or at least the phrase "get stuck" would, e.g., "I got stuck with doing the dishes" or "I got stuck in dealing with these asshole customers and was late to dinner."

"Get stuck in" is really "get stuck into" or "get stuck in to". You can of course get stuck in something - like a traffic jam, or jam (sorry, jelly), or treacle (sorry, molasses) or a lift (sorry, elevator).

That's pretty much what I figured. I had never heard the U.K. usage of "getting stuck into" something.

So, I guess I'm shockingly old to have just learned that.

nah these days it's wise to ignore the UK for as long as possible ;)

used to hear "get stuck into" be used about fighting when I was a kid, "he got stuck right into him"

the names "Eugene" and "Eugenia" ('well-born') rose to popularity during the 20th Century eugenics boom

never made that connection

whoa

Wow. I didn't know the meaning of Eugene, so never made the connection to the name either.

My recent learning was that Judy Garland was only 47 when she died. She looked/seemed about 20 years older than that at the end.

Drugs are bad

Andy, that's an interesting point. My grandfather Eugene was born in 1915.

My sister Eugenia (named after him, obviously) was born in 1970.

I heard it on a BBC podcast series about eugenics

mars is only 53% surface areas if earth that seems so positively teeny. by land now kid, they ain’t making more

area of

yeah, but isn't 70% of the Earth's surface area ocean? Wouldn't that mean there is more land on mars?

Eugene Debs also a likely source of all those Eugenies.

xp Mars is even smaller than that. Per Wikipedia, It's surface area is about 28% of Earth's. (Mars radius is 53% of Earth's)

Land surface area of Earth (149 sq km) is slightly larger than entire Mars surface area (144 sq km).

*Its not it's

Land surface area of Earth (149 sq km) is slightly larger than entire Mars surface area (144 sq km).

― Kim Kimberly

Wait, what?

Oceans

I'm talking about the sizes given.

149 square kilometers is 57.5 square miles. Pretty sure Earth is bigger than that.

Oh, right. There are some zeroes missing probably.

I sometimes wonder how much bigger would Mars have to be to have retained its atmosphere and oceans as long as earth has or if Venus hadn't become hotter than hades, there could have been a scenario with 3 planets containing multicellular life. That would have been pretty wild!

huh i relied on google supplied figure for surface area and it was wrong or i didn’t bother to check too hard— thx for correction

The surface area of Mars is 144.8 million kilometers squared or 55.91 miles squared. In comparison, the surface of the earth is 196.9 million miles squared (510.1 million kilometers squared). Its surface area is 53 percent the size of Earth's, with a diameter of 4,222 miles.

they've missed a million there

but how is 144.8 53% of 510.1?

Ma and Pa Kettle might know

sqrt(144) is 53% of sqrt(510)

roughly

I sometimes wonder how much bigger would Mars have to be to have retained its atmosphere and oceans as long as earth has or if Venus hadn't become hotter than hades, there could have been a scenario with 3 planets containing multicellular life. That would have been pretty wild!

There are a couple of complicating factors... Mars has no magnetic field and Venus' rotation around it's axis is too slow (speculation is that Venus would be tidally locked to the sun if it wasn't for all that atmosphere)

I thought the reason Mars lacks a magnetic field strong enough to spare it from the solar winds is related to its size, like the stored heat and energy at its core created billions of years ago cooled down because the little red fucker is just too small.