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")

xp re steam, I was told that outside it's raining but inside it's wet

It's true, steam is an invisible gas. The white we see is water vapor. Steam leaks are incredibly dangerous - in power plants where they can be common but hard to hear because the whole environment is so loud, you carry a stick in front of you so it hits the leak first (and dramatically shatters). I was present once when a guy failed to do that and lost his arm to a pinhole leak.

fuckin YIKES

I expect they use some kind of thermal visualization tool now, that was 20+ years ago.

that deadly and largely invisible pinhole leak is going to haunt my thoughts for a while now

Are we just not going to mention quiet steam here or what

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9WcHlURmxY

Is that what is meant by "super-heated" steam??? I knew someone in high school who almost lost an eye to an equipment leak, I think on the family farm.

Here's a good reference for steam basics: https://cincinnatitriplesteam.org/documents/SteamTables.pdf

It's true, steam is an invisible gas. The white we see is water vapor. Steam leaks are incredibly dangerous - in power plants where they can be common but hard to hear because the whole environment is so loud, you carry a stick in front of you so it hits the leak first (and dramatically shatters). I was present once when a guy failed to do that and lost his arm to a pinhole leak.

― Jaq, Wednesday, 22 January 2025 16:56 (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is incredibly interesting and i am absolutely aghast to have read it

Yeah I saw a whole pile of similar steam injuries in my youth. No amputations but some deep wounds.

but E17 said there's no need to be afraid!

Tracer: it's called "cross-chaining" and it's more of a problem in older bikes (main cause of derailing or dropping your chain) but on newer bikes it's not terrible, it just introduces stress/inefficiencies in the transfer of power through the drivetrain because of the side-loading of the chain at extreme angles.

That "Quiet Steam" version rules. I also like the like-minded Massive Attack remix of "Games Without Frontiers:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G1EY-6Sgd0

Seals and Crofts had daughters who were in a band together, but they didn't call it Seals and Crofts.

Later a different Crofts daughter formed a band with a cousin of Seals.

_That_ band was called Seals and Crofts 2.

This polyamide was unveiled at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and the original marketing material for this fabric insisted that it was stronger than steel and entirely resistant to runs. Therefore, DuPont initially intended to market this new synthetic fabric as "no-run," but as it became readily apparent that nylon stockings were, in fact, highly susceptible to runs, the name was changed to "nuron" and later "nilon." Before this fabric entered into mass production, the "i" in "nilon" was replaced with a "y" so that customers would be able to accurately pronounce the name of this fabric.

So it isn't named after New York/London after all.

that's a good one, didn't know that

agreed!

That opening up threads that upset you will upset you.

The LGBTQIetc community now has a set of individual flags to represent which subset one identifies with.
There is one for Polyamory with a Greek symbol/letter in the middle of it. Is that because everybody loves pi(e)?

I bet that pun is as old as the flag but it was my spontaneous response to hearing that.
Do wonder if it was a conscious visual pun and possible trigger to coming up with the design.

From the Fun Rock file: Al Kooper was in the Royal Teens for a short time ("Short Shorts"--awful!--though Kooper joined after that).

Short Shorts was written by Bob Gaudio though, which is cool.

Kooper was all of 14 when he went on tour with them (presumably hired as a guitar player but decided he'd play the organ instead, thus changing the course of history).

speaking of Gaudio

After the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released in June 1967, Gaudio saw the pop music market changing, and sought to position the Four Seasons into the trend of socially conscious music. One evening he went to the Bitter End in Greenwich Village and saw Jake Holmes performing. Gaudio was taken with Holmes' song "Genuine Imitation Life" and decided to base a Four Seasons album upon it. With Holmes as his new lyricist, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette album was released in January 1969. The album was a commercial failure and symbolized the end of the Four Seasons' first period of success. The appreciation of The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette has grown over the years, and it was re-released on CD (minus the newspaper cover) in the 1990s by Rhino in the U.S. and Ace in the UK.

i need to check this out!

Oh it's great. And while different, Gaudio and Holmes followed that up by writing and producing Frank Sinatra's Watertown, which his hipster classic. It doesn't sound of it's time or psychedelic or anything, it's just like one Sinatra's moody albums but with a bit more of a Scott Walker/Lee Hazlewood melancholy jazzy vibe.

cool, yeah i dig it so far. has a bit of SMiLE/Red, White, and Blaine vibe. will check Watertown too

There are two different cities called Hyderabad, one in India and one in Pakistan. They aren't even that close to each-other.

That steam is such a potent burn agent because it has no maximum temperature, as steam is the final state of water (at least until it theoretically turns to plasma or sparks nuclear fission or something far, far beyond my comprehension of physics) .

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, January 22, 2025 9:42 AM (two weeks ago)

This polyamide was unveiled at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and the original marketing material for this fabric insisted that it was stronger than steel and entirely resistant to runs. Therefore, DuPont initially intended to market this new synthetic fabric as "no-run," but as it became readily apparent that nylon stockings were, in fact, highly susceptible to runs, the name was changed to "nuron" and later "nilon." Before this fabric entered into mass production, the "i" in "nilon" was replaced with a "y" so that customers would be able to accurately pronounce the name of this fabric.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, February 6, 2025 3:18 PM (two days ago)

I was shockingly old when I learned that the band who originally recorded "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" (you probably remember the 1987 cover by The Nylons) was called Steam

lol nice. i think only canadians have heard the nylon version tho

Just discovered that Teardrops by Womack & Womack wasn't even a hit in the US.

"Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" (you probably remember the 1987 cover by The Nylons)

Pronouns in this song gave plausible deniability in two directions for this group

I only started using my phone to pay for things a few months ago, but this was still a mortifying discovery: I was having trouble tapping through the barriers on the London Underground, when a member of staff gently explained that the sensor was on the back of the phone, not the front ("that's just a picture of a card"). FFS!

bananarama did an awesome version before the stupid nylons. though when their version came out i already knew the original cuzza constant am/fm radio play. i still prefer bananarama's version.

oh but i came here to say: ice doesn't freeze on a polar bear's fur! because they secrete an oily substance called sebum from glands connected to their hair follicles. apparently nobody knew this until recently so i don't feel bad for not knowing it. a scientist at the university of bergen in norway found this out. this is why inuit hunters put polar bear fur on the soles of their boots so that they can be really quiet and avoid the noise made by ice-coated surfaces.

they secrete an oily substance called sebum from glands connected to their hair follicles

humans do this also.

and yet we still get icy hair. "...the force required to remove ice from polar bear hair was a quarter of what was needed for human hair - meaning the bears can easily shake any ice off."

nothing like the newest copy of New Scientist to while away the hours before a superbowl.

I secrete sebum from my pebum

Precursor of the kazoo:

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

alexis mac allister is argentinian

disagreeing with someone on a message board is defamation

I secrete sebum from my pebum
― Dialysis Den (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, February 9, 2025 5:04 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

James Joyce?

First draft of "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

the stupid nylons

hehehehe

From the people who brought you "Dumb Starbucks"

Ingmar Bergman was married to an Ingrid who was NOT Ingrid Bergman.

That Salt-N-Pepa's "Whatta Man" is a remake of a 1968 soul hit I've never heard.

What! <googles>

yeah that's blowing my mind. it sounds great too

yeah great song. i thought I'd learned that from this thread! but nothing doing on control-F, must have been somewhere else on ILX.

I found out via the Rob Harvilla book.