Making References To Things When You Are 99% Sure People Have Never Heard Of It - C/D

i've never heard of your boss.

pwned!

xxpost hahahha!

SAILOR MOON

p.s. who is chris morris?

I do this all the time. Mostly to amuse myself.

it's a bit like 'jury-rigged'.

it means the reference was forced into the conversation.. presumably to show off his knowledge of chris morris. i still don't know who chris morris is but unless he is the CEO of Xerox or something I can't see how any mention of his name can be anything but crowbarred during a photocopier discussion.

this thread totally reminds me of a conversation i had with Euclid Pavlova, the stylophone-player in Aussie spunk-funk 12-piece Pustule.

crowbarred: mm, depends on context, but here it would be like literally, from the other day:

person who has no idea who haile selassie is: strewth, when i'm walking home there's a real smell of ganja.
boss: oh well halie selassie hated ganj.
person who has no idea who haile selassie is: er, yeah.

Classic.

halie selassie was a warehouse staff?

or it just involves really elongated and poorly delivered explanations. eg,

office: [talk about documentary on drugs on tv]
boss: oh, it's like that bit in 'fear and loathing in las vegas'
office: [blank]
boss: by hunter s thompson
office: [blank]
boss: well, there's this bit where, er, they say drugs are groovy, and....

DUD.

I know a guy who used to do improv, and he was always throwing in references that no one else in the scene would get. That's like the worst thing to do in improv, where you're supposed to trust each other and help advance the scene. Fortunately, his scene partners were able to turn it around and mock his character, saying "oooh, looks like we got a smart guy in the room!"

I thought crowbar was Tom Cru!se's nickname for C4meron Cr0we.

When I do it: Classic. When others do it: Dud.

oh god, i can just see cruise control saying that.

But maybe I just got that from an SNL sketch.

At least you have a boss that knows that Franz Ferdinand is also a band, and not just that guy that got killed. If I asked my boss what Franz Ferdinand sounded like, he'd probably look at me funny, then say "ugh".

i do love the idea that in my boss's head a 22-year-old who has *never heard* frank fernando will be well up on josef k and orange juice.

Chris Morris is a journalist working for the BBC.

who's frank fernando ?

i like orange juice

What annoys me the most about this is that it means that the person either has a really poor sense of estimating what people know or don't know, or else they just want to show off and make the person they're talking to feel inferior.

This is how I feel on ILX when someone starts a thread about some Lithuanian dialectical art-punk collective I've never heard of, even though it's actually an ideal place to start this kind of threads as you might get responses from the plethora of like-minded young intellectuals which would be hard to come by otherwise.

oh wait is that the guy who did the brass eye thing?

this thread has been Classic to me so far, so ... classic!!

oh, yesterday the ref was to SIGUR ROS. many of my coworkers are recent immigrants from down under, making it worse. but he does know that they don't know.

i've heard of sigur ros!!!

Classic.

sorry i'm just offering my services as a yardstick here.. things that i have heard of basically mean 99% of people have heard of it!!

sigur ros are like famous! they were the penultimate act main stage in glastonbury 2003!!

i've heard OF sigur ros. maybe my coworkers are unusually ignorant, but i don't think so. plus he doesn't own a television and is proud of it.

sailor moon was on telly.

About four years ago, I appeared on VH1 game show, and the host, Karen Bryant, asked what disc was currently in my disc player at home. I said "Fun House by the Stooges." That was true, but in watching the way I said it comes across AS SO UNBELIEVABLY PRETENTIOUS that I curl up into a self-loathing fetal ball every time I've had to watch it (we've mercifully broken our VCR so that's now impossible). It's not that Fun House by the Stooges is an especially esoteric choice, but I just sound/look like such a haughty snob dick saying it. Anytime I think of slipping in some musical reference or allusion into a conversation, I think back to that moment and wisely edit m'self.

i know about sailor moon too! i've played the video game of it.

ILX seems like a different case, though, because you're not necessarily addressing your thread to any one particular person -- you're sincerely hoping that someone who does know what you're talking about will come along.

but i think mark reckons there is a certain one-up-man-ship thing going on on ilx too (like wow i'm raising a topic that noone else will know about they're gonna ph34r me lolerz!)

i dunno what sailor moon is.

Yeah, I don't deny that that probably happens in its own way, Ken.

s1ocki for President

Alex, it is in no way pretentious to say that you have been listening to THE GREATEST AMERICAN ROCK ALBUM EVER.

Whereas in conversation the person you're talking to often feels put on the spot, like "does he want me to ask him what that is?"

Yeah, in fact it is a balancing act when you are talking to other people, between trying not to appear like a nerdy showoff kid who never grew up and pulling all your punches so you are just as boring as everybody else!

sometimes it's subconscious though - sometimes I find yourself making ilx references to people at work who have no fooking clue what I'm talking about.

although once I told my flatmate he was OTM and he said "on the money"? and i was impressed (then i said actually i mean "over the moon2)

Well, isn't he?

Jaymc, your response to my post above is exactly what I was trying to say - yet it does sometimes annoy me and the only explanation I can think of is that it makes me feel stupid.

if i can't talk to you guys about lithuanian art-punk, who CAN i talk to?? ilm is good b/c there's always SOME loser who knows what i'm on about and wrote a review of the thing i'm into five years before i got into it.

feeling stupid builds character.

Sure, but it doesn't excuse asshattery.

stupid people can be asshats too!

I don't mind it unless it's done in a way reminiscent of Dennis Miller.

Ha!

and then ends with "10-10-2-20"

Hm. Well, about half the time I assume I *am* stupid, at least w/r/t that topic, which means it's a GREAT opportunity to get the person in question to share all his or her pre-digested info from which I can benefit without doing any research of my own. Lecture me, lecture me! I will ingest your brain fact by fact.

But sometimes I will have a random spot of knowledge gained as above and be talking to a 3rd party with NO IDEA whether what I'm saying is common knowledge or completely obscure and uninteresting to 99% of the gene pool. Then I will be guilty of the sins of this thread.

good point re morris, lord knows. anyway, i have worked out the real problem: the problem is *i* get the references and no-one else here does, which leaves me in a tricky situation, like he looks at me for tacit support -- hey, *we're* insidery enough to know who mr scruff is, etc.

It's funny when you DO know what they're on about, but you pretend you don't and you revel in watching them tying themselves in knots trying to explain the reference. Even more classic, if they really don't fully understand the reference themselves and they get deliciously snared.

that's usually what i do, or i explain it (better than he could) to our coworkers. with the mr scruff ref, i said it was the kind of thing they play on location location location during montage sequences, which i think counts as pwnj.

Haha. They use Scruff on the snooker as well.

It's like Johannes Suarnes always said (or sang once, actually), "The clouds are parting ways, my friend, but do they even care about the sun? The sun will always shine, my friend, whether the clouds know or care."

My boss does this, and yes, pretending not to know what he's talking about then asking him is the easiest way for him to look like a berk.

haile selassie = former emperor of Abyssinia, revered as the messiah by Rastafarians.

Halie Selassie was a top class long distance runner.
bah xpost

This is hard, because I lose perspective on what people know. I'm too used to hanging out with my old friends and ILXers, who know a fuck of a lot, and I find I try to make similar references at work and am not understood. I also lose perspective on things I know a lot and am immersed in - recently this has been Japanese art, and I find myself assuming that everyone knows who Utamaro is, things like that. On a similar deal, an old friend of mine once said in a 'don't be silly' kind of way, "Oh everyone knows who John Dos Passos is."

it's about guessing it and hitting the right notes more often than not, but this guy is almost pathologically bad at it.

i get it wrong too: i expected a film writer friend to instantly know what 'crime story' (michael mann tv series) was. conversely he thought i would know who [some japanese guy, does cartoons] is.

Conversation overheard in the lunch room today:

Systems man: "The weird thing about Charlie's Angels the TV series was how Charlie was so frequently used as a deus ex machina."
Production woman: "Deus ex...wha?"
Systems man: (lengthy explanation of dramatic devices in Ancient Greece, yada yada yada)

Area Systems Man Impresses Lunchtime Crowd With His Juxtaposition Of High And Low Culture.

My friend J is a sweetie, but lives in his own head and has bugger all sense of persepctive. So he'll open conversations with questions like: "So do you know who U2 are?" but by the same token will talk about some unsigned north London band as though they were known by most.

He doesn't do it deliberatley, he's just a spacer.

you are Systems Man, admit it.

i nearly had to do this today, but to correct someone - someone has just joined the company. someone else sent around an email saying 'we accept you, we accept you, one of us, one of us' etc along with an attached gif of those aliens from Toy Story. er, Tod Browning anyone?

koogs, did you raise up a loving cup to toast the new employee?

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EVER HEARD OF IT I DONT THINK SO MATE

erm, perhaps once or twice.