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")

I'd always assumed that was the main reason why they were immediately popular, because nepotism.

as a witness me too

l’morte d’Arthur is one of those rare “oh yeah i used to know that! i even used to think it when i heard death of the author i think.” he’s dead now, tho. i don’t mean arthur or the author. i’m online now. regards, algernon

the most irish city in the u.s. is butte, montana.

dj sotofett and dj fett burger are brothers

Had some family friends over and we put on “Hook” to keep the little kids occupied… suddenly about 20 or so minutes into the film all of the adults, myself included, who’d seen this as a kid in the 90s were like “wait…. Is that Phil fucking Collin’s?!”

I like both the Wilson Phillips song and Angel of the Morning is a banger

i thought the word "insurgency" meant they were surging in from across the border into another country, thought this was what it meant until i was at least in my 40s

misapprehension probably dating from vietnam war news coverage heard as a child. also obv 'cause that's what it sounds like

“Midge” is “Jim” backwards

George Lucas has only directed six feature films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, the original Star Wars (1977) and Episodes I-III. I could've sworn he directed something between '77 and '99 but no

I watched that ILM doc on the Disney a channel. He may as well have directed many of the movies he was involved with for how much he took part as producer or whatever.

I watched that ILM doc on the Disney a channel.

Momentarily excited.

xp yeah iirc Howard the Duck, for example, was promoted using his name heavily.

IIRC, Lucas supposedly added few/some/many reshoots on Red Tails. I haven't seen the film so have mostly ignored whatever of this is apocryphal

Semi-related to that Lucas fact: it's remarkable to me how *few* movies Warren Beatty has been in. Twenty-three film acting roles (total per wikipedia) doesn't seem like much for a guy with a career as long and significant as his.

I don’t think anyone has watched Red Tails, no matter how sympathetic they were to the premise. I like many things about it in theory! Have not watched.

Taking sides on movies George Lucas might have directed but no one has seen: Red Tails vs. Radioland Murders

Warren Beatty took that long acting break between Reds (1981) and Ishtar (1987) when he was only in his 40s. Haven't read a bio of him, so don't know why.

I think I’ve been lucky enough not to have to do movie after movie after movie for financial reasons, so I’ve been able to live life, and also make movies. I didn’t have to grind them out. I could go long periods where I was living life, rather than tripping over cables. Sometimes life just takes over, as it has taken over with four kids, in a way that has been more wonderful than I could have imagined at an earlier age.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/warren-beatty-interview

i was thinking that that sounded like a shocking amount of self-awareness for somebody like george lucas until i saw the hyperlink

Headline at the Guardian today:

Wily coyotes thrive in Central Park as animals adapt to urban life across US

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are a duo of cartoon characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons

I remember there being a movie that came out in the late 80’s that George Lucas was attached to (producer?) because I was a Star Wars kid and his name was enough to get me hopped up. But st some point I realized that whatever it was, there were no lasers or aliens so it didn’t matter.

In my mind, this was Radio Days. I remember seeing the poster as a kid and thinking that was the new George Lucas thing and it looked boring. Now I know that Radio Days was a
Woody Allen movie, so I don’t know what I was confused about. Radioland Murders was years later when I wouldn’t have really cared. I wonder if my mom told me about American Graffiti and my ten year old brain combined that with the old timey Woody Allen poster? But I could have sworn he directed a period piece flop in the 80’s.

And yeah, good for Beatty to live how he wants... it's just surprising that he didn't make that many movies, considering that he's been a very famous a-lister for so long.

re beatty i always assumed it’s all merely because he was a very pretty boy and his level of talent or goodness was irrelevant. this is a much a criticism of my ignorance as it is one of the star system or of him. i don’t want to read more of him elsewhere unless i’m told i really should, but if he’s a good’un, that’s nice enough.

He was a very important filmmaker no matter his looks. Bonnie and Clyde alone, which he produced, changed American cinema.

67-75 or so he was untouchable. McCabe and Mrs Miller, the Paralax View, Shampoo…

You should read his wiki bio at least. Interesting life.

noted and thank you truly i will learn then

I dunno I heard he was rather vain

Bet he thinks this thread is about him.

Sardines are named after Sardinia (Sardegna in Italian, Sardaigne in French).

I made the link between sardines and Sardinia but weirdly assumed it was the other way around (Sardinia named after Sardines, I guess because for place names with animals names in North America it tends to be more that the place is named for an animal that is present there)

I didn’t learn this recently but I was embarrassingly old when I learned that many immigrants are very right wing. Two recent reminders are this was a Latino man with limited English driving me telling me all about how Kamala Harris was giving immigrants free five star hotels (this happened just a couple weeks ago) and a Chinese restaurant TV tuned to Sky News (which first had a talking head talking about how Farage would “stop the boats in days” and then a live Trump cabinet meeting.

yeah. "people are stupid" applies to all kinds of people

The association of the fish with the island was a minor plot point in the WWII deception Operation Mincemeat.

One of the planted letters mentioned a rise in demand for sardines as clumsy (easily spotted) code that the invasion would be via the cover objective of Sardinia. As opposed to the way more obvious (and actual) route via Sicily.

There is no indication that the intended German interceptors got the joke.

Thank God for German (lack of) sense of humour.

I was a university student when I first found out the German sense of humor is very regional. There's an entire subset of the country where they seem very serious, and when they're being funny, they sound *even more* serious. It's a decent bit.

Deadpan humor works best if you're a cold fish.

I was a university student when I first found out the German sense of humor is very regional. There's an entire subset of the country where they seem very serious, and when they're being funny, they sound *even more* serious. It's a decent bit.

That would be North Germany, right? The NDR TV series 'Der Tatortreiniger', set in Hamburg and later adapted by Greg Davies into BBC1's 'The Cleaner', is a good example of this. It reminds me a lot of the West Midlands deadpan humour mined by Stewart Lee (among others).

I'd never heard of these extremely cute traditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telling_the_bees

Grandma Moses' surname was actually Moses.

I just thought they called her that because she was old as shit.

I've only just found out that a mule is the hybrid offspring of a donkey and a horse, and, with the exception of some historical anomalies, cannot reproduce themselves.

Chiroptera— the family of bats— are 1/5 of all mammal species and perhaps 1/4 of the total population of mammals. This seems obviously ridiculous and must be untrue. But apparently it is true?

Apparently it's much more than a 1/4:

The global biomass of wild mammals

Bats (Chiroptera), for example, comprise one-fifth of species and two-thirds in terms of individual mammals, but only contribute less than one-tenth of the total biomass of wild land mammals, as shown in Fig. 2.

(And yeah this seems a remarkable fact, one that i had no idea about.)

Though including humans would give that 1/4 figure i guess.

obligatory post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8Ygt_t69A

i love that there are scientific studies to answer the question, "What if we weighed on the animals?"

was coming to post that i never knew David Crosby was in Les Baxter's Balladeers

xp *weighed ALL the animals

... sorry

What was David Crosby's biomass percentage in Les Baxters' Balladeers?

'how many divisions do the bats have?'

- stalin

I am so tempted to poll songs feat. bats

this poll might already exist since 25% of all songs are secretly or obv about bats— more you know