Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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?

How a candle works.

Practically everything.

that SHIFT + 6 = ^. I think I figured it out a month or so ago. I always wondered how people got that character.

DO you have a Mac?

The best things about macs is that making any character is stupid easy.

¢™
øºÖØ°

&¶¶¶¶¶¶

!

That (most) BMWs are named according to engine size (I was a car freak as a child but never knew this until being informed by a German flatmate while I was a PhD student).

i.e. 318 = 3 series 1.8 litre engine etc.

Didn't know that black and green olives are identical, just different stage of maturity, until a few months ago.

Didn't realise that Adam Ant was a pun, until a year or so ago. Likewise Lipps Inc.

I've got a mac and I still don't know how to do any of, um, ^ those ^

I end up going to wikipedia and copy-and-pasting when I want unusual characters

The cows-and-bulls thing, plus Adam Ant, are the only things on this thread that I do know

how to cook an artichoke properly

(a julia child recipe steered me right)

How to tie my shoes (velcro, you see..)

Didn't realise that Adam Ant was a pun, until a year or so ago.

^^^ this. Same with Sandy Shaw.

Fay Fife of the Rezillos.

(i.e. it's a pun on "I am from the town of Fife, my good fellow" in broad scots)

What's the Adam Ant pun? Adam Ant = adamant? If so... pretty lame pun.

That's it.

xpost Tell that to Lai Mpun, the lead singer of Bangkok's Phleng Chat.

I am 33 and didn't know any of these things. Wait - how the hell DOES a candle work?!

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")

The Boomer station here has a show called "The Immortals," and today's was on Ray Charles. I never knew that a) Curtis Mayfield wrote "Hit the Road Jack," or that b) Don Gibson of "Oh, Lonesome Me" fame wrote "I Can't Stop Loving You."

"Hit the Road Jack" was written by Percy Mayfield, not Curtis

I believe in water.

you and me both.

https://theonion.com/report-every-place-on-earth-has-wrong-amount-of-water-1851544516/

Josefa -- Thanks. 100% blaming the DJ on that one.

https://www.zoomerradio.ca/hosts/larry-jackson

I've decided that not knowing something that's not true is exactly the same as knowing it.

The color saffron is not a deep red like the spice, but a kind of golden yellow

Add that to the list of confusing color names along with vermilion, which is not a green but an orange-red

wait what

First two lines of "Mellow Yellow":

I'm just mad about Saffron
Saffron's mad about me

!

Never caught that

Apparently there's something of a spectrum (the "orange" on the Indian flag is referred to as saffron or Indian saffron), but I was pretty surprised to learn that e.g. this color could be described as saffron:

https://colorguide.org/images/thumbnails/colorguide.org-saffron-BS6GZh.jpg

The name of the color and the spice are both derived from the tip of the saffron crocus flower:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Crocus_sativus2.jpg

I was pretty confused because I was reading about the Je Khenpo, who traditionally is the only spiritual leader in Bhutan who's allowed to wear a "saffron" robe. I was looking at the picture thinking, aren't most of them wearing saffron robes??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_Khenpo#/media/File:The_Spiritual_Leader_of_Bhutan_Walking_to_the_festival.jpg

oops .. link here

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/The_Spiritual_Leader_of_Bhutan_Walking_to_the_festival.jpg

Saffron the spice is weird, it releases yellowness when its soaked in warm liquid

Saffron dyes fabric and food yellow, that's why.

No from other pics of that i think that’s a gold robe with a saffron scarf

i dunno in my zen world saffon is that warm soft orange-y color

The color and the spice are both yellow. I mean the dried spice is a deep orange/pink, but you don't use it dried you soak it and it turns things yellow.

I was shockingly old when I found out that some people didn't know saffron was yellow and vermillion was red.

Well, I did know that vermilion is red, just as I know that October is not the eighth month of the year, still confusing names though

I don't think that thinking saffron is the color of saffron is that weird!

I suppose I was familiar with the colour saffron before I was familiar with the spice saffron.

why is it so expensive if it only makes rice yellow

because delicious

and because you have to harvest by hand only a few tiny parts of a flower.

https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article28458560.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Absolutely-Fabulous.jpg

saffie was a cutie

yuca, cassava, and tapioca arethe same and all from new world as i understand it. i thought cassava were african and tapioca south asian native things

I didn’t know that either. it’s insane that so much stuff came from the Americas

the fried yuca my cousins served in lima were so so good. that is the extent of my knowledge of this foodstuff.

yep the Peruvians do it best

A thing I was shockingly old when I learned it is that Heathcliff, the cat comic - that one that famously predates Garfield but was never as popular - went weird a quarter of a century ago and I didn't notice:
https://solrad.co/everybodys-mad-about-heathcliff

The original creator, George Gately, retired from the strip in the late 1990s. He passed it on to his brother John Gallagher, who also retired, so Gallagher's son, Peter Gallagher, took over in 2001. Peter Gallagher was and remains a fan of Zippy the Pinhead and turn-of-the-millennium anti-humour, and so from that day to this Heathcliff has been a load of absurd, dada-esque non-sequiturs. The strip still runs in hundreds of papers worldwide, but it doesn't make sense. I have to admit that the last time I thought about Heathcliff was in the 1980s, when there was a cartoon on television. At some point in the 1990s it dawned on me that Garfield wasn't funny, and so I stopped thinking about it - I trained myself to do this - but sadly the mental bleach also killed any interest I had in Heathcliff as well.

https://www.taterecord.com/sites/default/files/field/image/08_26_21_6e6d12e97686e774d314c69a1a9edd7d_1.jpg

I was struck by this Reddit thread, in which a bunch of people assume that a strip that mentions social distancing is "old man yells at cloud", but in fact it's just meaningless surrealism:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boomershumor/comments/gfuhrs/i_dont_even_get_the_message/

"The artist heard the phrase "social distancing" and wanted to get in on the action. He probably just ran out of "phones are bad" hot takes." It's amusing to watch a bunch of people who are convinced that they're smart hipsters being totally wrong about something. Imagine if that happened to Ilxor! But it won't, because we've seen behind the curtain. We've seen the man who manipulates the weather. Some of us are him. Man, and woman. Let's not be sexist here.

https://img.fireden.net/co/image/1447/23/1447237875143.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/wr7xZVXv/KK7.png

Crazy if true

https://i.postimg.cc/ry3ztHK3/couldnt-sleep-made-this-wuthering-heights-starring-v0-8tqr2qmrxgig1.jpg

Heathcliff supporting cast (Jimmy, Garbage Ape, brofish) >>>> Heathcliff himself

that Heathcliff reader anecdote reminds me
of a time my cat was recovering from something and I thought trekking downstairs to the litter box might be too
much effort so I set one up on the main floor. three days, nothing. he’s still going downstairs. fourth day, I’m about to get rid of the main floor box and he walks over, sits down in the box as if it’s a cat bed, and looks at me as if he’s proud of himself

he was completely fucking with me. I was defeated by a cat that was on gabapentin

Aw yeah, I really enjoy the absurd Heathcliff era.

https://www.howtolovecomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/meat-tank-heathcliff.jpg

wtf is that real

“Meat Tank” should have been Floyd’s DTF St Louis username.

“Meat Tank” should have been Floyd’s DTF St Louis username.

OK this is a revelation to me and I love it.

https://i.ibb.co/kPCxkBm/05-06-26-b1d016386d0ce33369a71d2955cfd266.jpg

I guess part of the gag is that "cheese" rhymes with "speed," which makes the Spanish version even more surreal:

https://i.ibb.co/mF4hCFtm/05-06-26-f8b44db71d87da996446912099864b6a.jpg

but cheese doesn't rhyme with speed, also it looks like the ham and the cheese are both going the same speed, also etc.

"There is no cheese limit" vs "There is no speed limit for cheese"

🤔

Nope, there were already multiple “ham limit” strips this is just a further riff on that

It's a ham reduction strategy.

First, do no ham.

Add me to the list of ilxors who is behind the curve on Heathcliff's sharp turn into the avant-garde

I wouldn’t go as far as shocking but I am mildly surprised at this, I thought shitpost heathcliff was p well known in ilxy circles. Much better reinvention than sluggo is lit-era Nancy imo

no reason to clash them imo

pplains, I'm on team "it's not a pun, it's just absurdism".

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Screenshot_2023_05_19_at_16_07_01_Heathcliff_by_Peter_Gallagher_for_May_12_2023_GoComics.com__1684538257_25622.png

I'm a week late but I just learned that not everybody associates saffron with yellow