Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Nothing untoward at all about renaming yourself for your mom's family but self-christening with a more "ayyy New Yoooak" name when you're running for city council is kind afunny

Will that, and the German emperor.

I had no idea that actor (etc.) Wallace Shawn was the son of William Shawn, the famed New Yorker editor. (I also could have sworn he was dead, but maybe I was thinking of William Goldman.)

Limahl (of “The Neverending Story” fame) was the singer in Kajagoogoo.

Kevin Spacey's real name is Kevin Fowler, which tbf is extraordinarily boring name for an actor and sounds like the reserve team manager at Accrington Stanley or something.

Limahl (of “The Neverending Story” fame) was the singer in Kajagoogoo.

Ha - at one point my learning process went exactly in reverse: Limahl, the singer for 80s one-hit wonders Kajagoogoo, had a song in the movie The Neverending Story, which I have never seen.

Yeah, no he is definitely of Kajagoogoo and indeed Limahl fame.

Did not know that about the Shawns

Limahl was the other Mark Hamill, which is what the stage name was an anagram of, surname at least.
Did taht haircut take off much? Looks like he's wearing an animal head or something on his head.

Nick Beggs the band bassist went onto some renown I heard.

Max Born is Olivia Newton-John's grandfather.

Suzi Quatro is Sherilyn Fenn's aunt.

this guy is juliette lewis's father

https://i.imgur.com/gltiD6k.jpg

he's his own grandpa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A4ADzu-v3s

I'm assuming "this guy" is Elisha Cook, Jr., who appeared in both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, among many notable films. Imdb lists over 200 acting credits for his career. And a real fun guy, too.

elisha cook jr. is a different (and considerably older) this guy. but i hear you cluckin, big chicken

that is geoffrey lewis of many clint eastwood movies and 'murder, she wrote' episodes and also, i've learned, the bodyguard from the jean-claude van damme vehicle 'double impact'

he should have been a townie in 'blazing saddles' but wasn't

Ah, Salem's Lot! That's where I know that guy!

(Also starring the aforementioned Elisha Cook, coincidentally.)

Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor sang backing vocals on Neil Young's "Heart of Gold."

Italy is smaller than Arizona.

okay that freaks me out

Europe is about the size of like New Jersey iirc

Not quite but it came up in conversation: Italy has like five or six distinct food regions.

How many regional cuisines exist in, say, Nevada (roughly comparable in land area)?

I realize it's not fair to ignore population and population density, but still.

I heard somewhere that size doesn't matter.

that the population of much much larger by landmass than UK country, Pakistan, was still lower than them as late as 1968

The US state of Wyoming has more landmass than the UK, yet has less than 1% its population

and yet more US Senators than the UK!

I always thought of Pakistan as a very large country, current pop 212m. Just never realised it was still quite sparsely populated as late as '68.

xp Yeah it actually makes me bitter that I live in a borough of NYC that has 5x the population of Wyoming yet my ENTIRE STATE - let alone my city, let alone my borough - has the same number of senators as fucking Wyoming

Italy has like five or six distinct food regions.

Is that all?

xps

But i suppose Pakistan and India did both have the opposite of a post-war baby boom after the disastrous partition left millions dead on both sides.

That the population of Ireland has only just reached and surpassed what it was in 1855. And is still some way short of what it was in 1841. In contrast the population of England is over 4 times what it was in 1841.

the problem after the mass flight of the famine was that of the male peasants that stayed behind, many of them had freakishly distended forehead syndrome (see brendan o'neill) which led to a population crash!

San Bernardino County in California is larger in landsize than Switzerland.

And neither is a member of the E.U.

today i was shockingly old when i learnt how ginormous san bernardino cty is-- that would be the 42nd biggest state. i am trying hard to resist looking into this further.

As big as 20 Rhode Islands, iirc.

Picturing 20 Woonsockets out in the desert somewhere, just chilling.

the bloke who wrote the 'who'd break a butterfly on a wheel?' piece about the rolling stones' drug arrests was J Rees-Mogg's dad.

Shame i thought taht was getting semi liberal. Not read it recently but i thought it was arguing against stentorian drug enforcement landing on the Stones at th etime of the Redlands bust. I think there's a tie in tv interview taht I have on video somewhere.

Just had it confirmed that New York is not part of New England. Always associate it with being part of it because the name comes from the UK obviously and its geographically almost right next to what is considered to be New England proper.

"Debrett's single sourceless sentence on the subject describes the charter of 1439 as a writ, although Cokayne denies that Ireland recognised the creation of peerages by writ; some websites have copied Debrett."

Washington DC is not a state. For some reason I always thought it was one.

i've been hearing the expression "it is always darkest before the dawn" all my life and it wasn't till about a week ago that i thought about it for more than a second and realized that it is not, in fact, true from a scientific pov

Washington DC is not a state. For some reason I always thought it was one.

― the grateful dead can dance (anagram), Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:35 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this tied in with teh deployment of troops there. If it had been a state t would have had to ok deployment with the state leadership.
I've heard a lot of people wanting to try to get DC State status because its residents don't have the same representation without it.

Correct. Unlike the 50 states that each get two senators, DC, not being a state, gets no representation in the Senate.

The baseball team in DC until 1971 was called the Senators. When the Montreal Expos moved to DC after decades of no baseball in the city, many wanted to revive the traditional Senators name, but others including DC's mayor objected to a city with no senators being called the Senators, so they became the Nationals.

xp Yeah it actually makes me bitter that I live in a borough of NYC that has 5x the population of Wyoming yet my ENTIRE STATE - let alone my city, let alone my borough - has the same number of senators as fucking Wyoming

― Josefa, Sunday, June 7, 2020 6:12 PM (two days ago) bookmark flaglink

This is one of the many reasons right-wing Republicans stay in power in the U.S. - most of the rural states with low populations are more conservative whereas high-population coastal states like New York and California are more liberal, but nonetheless Wyoming and Montana get as much Senate representation as California and New York.

D.C. also has no voting representation in the House. meanwhile its electoral-college representation is capped at the same number of electors as the least populous state, although i don't think that actually changes anything at current population levels.

DC is perpetually fucked, although arguably less so than Puerto Rico

i mean, i've come to terms with it by this point tbh

Feel like Puerto Rico has a better chance of being admitted as a state before DC.

Some people just can't get their head around a city being a state, no matter how much sense it makes. "Well why can't they just make it part of Maryland?" etc.

That is one of the more actionable/feasible suggestions tho

(That is, retaining the "monumental core" as a voteless Federal district, while retroceding the places where people actually, y'know, LIVE to a state that has representation.)

FWIW the Virginia portions of the District already did precisely that. In 1847. So there is precedent.

This has been an active issue my whole life, I have heard almost every argument and almost every proposed remedy and it is still a perpetual stalemate. I suspect it will be so when I die.

One of DC's most popular license plate mottos is "taxation without representation."

Today I learned that Northwestern University got its name because at the time of its founding in 1851, Chicago was the biggest city in the then northwestern, only modestly expanded United States. I mean, duh, but I never thought about it before.

I also recently learned that the phrase "happy as a clam" is truncated from "happy as a clam at high tide;" they're happy because they're harder to catch.

I assumed "happy as a clam" was because they appear to be smiling widely