Things you were shockingly old when you learned

There are multiple Fergies?

one was married to Prince Andrew

don't sweat it

i knew about that fergie from grocery store tabloid front covers when i was a kid, which made it confusing to learn about the other fergie when i was an older kid

it's extra confusing because both of them pissed their pants on live television

and the other one shit himself on the motorway

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/05/vivekchaudhary

(I actually knew there are multiple Fergies).

That feeling when i go to make a joek and find out KM already made it :/

;)

xxp how did I not know about that? My parents are fans of both Sir Alex and toilet humour so by rights this should've been a life-long-lasting joek in our house?

Talking of football, US ILXors will no doubt share my surprise in finding out that John McGinn is Jack McGinn's grandson.

xp

don't let that stop you neanderthal! you go ahead and make the pee joke too, i'm here for it!

the only thing i know about fergies is that they piss their pants

How come every time you come around
My pee-pee, pee-pee stream wanna drip down

Black Eyed Pee may still be one of the funniest headlines I've ever encountered

"White Christmas" is about missing Christmas while living in California.

the introductory verse is missing from a lot of renditions!

we sang that part in my caroling company - it was a nice bass solo. I remember wondering where the fuck it came from!

I just realized today that you can wear glasses and be a fighter pilot : all my life I thought it was a deal breaker !

I mean it’s still a deal breaker for initial flight school - you have to have 20/70 or 20/40 to start with - but you can have your vision deteriorate later to needing glasses all the time and still pass the flight physical.

at worst 20/70 or 20/40, obv

Magooin' the airways

Wow, the White Christmas intro (Irving Berlin):

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There's never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A
But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up North

Hafta admit I'd never heard it either.

we changed the words to Orlando, FLA in ours.

which makes no sense, cos no Floridian wants to be up north

Until the sea levels rise.

Just imagine them sea levels if you had snow on the ground!

I never knew there was an intro verse until right now

I was also shockingly old before I understood why anyone would need to dream of a white Christmas because in the frozen northern Midwest Christmas was always white, thanksgiving usually was and Halloween sometimes was

I only know of the into verse because they sing it on the ultra-classic Carpenters Christmas album.

I mean it’s still a deal breaker for initial flight school - you have to have 20/70 or 20/40 to start with - but you can have your vision deteriorate later to needing glasses all the time and still pass the flight physical.

ah thanks, yeah now you can still fly if you need glasses/laser surgery later on in your career (but apparently it wasn't always the case). I was just surprised to watch a F15 video yesterday with the pilot wearing glasses. I had never seen/noticed that. It must be VERY uncomfortable !

it's ok, i'm sure he was using his turn signal

I had no idea the guy who wrote "The Queen's Gambit" was the same guy that wrote "The Hustler," "The Color of Money" and (!) "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Apparently the Beth Harmon character was partly inspired by his own time spent in a children's school, where he was given phenobarbital, and his later life as an alcoholic. Not a bad run of books adapted into movies. Looked at the description of another of his books, "Mockingbird", and it seems like it would be greenlit today, too, since we're already living it: "Mockingbird is set in a grim and decaying New York City in the 25th century. The population is declining, no one can read, and robots rule over the drugged, illiterate humans. With the birth rate dropping, the end of the species seems a possibility."

TIL Czechia is another name for the Czech Republic.

They've only been using it since 2016 but they haven't had much success in persuading people outside, er, Czechia, to do likewise.

Depends on the language. Cehia is more common than Republica Cehă in Romanian. See also: Tchéquie (nearly 50/50 ime), Tschechien.

Either way, it's not as bad as calling the Netherlands 'Holland' like everyone does in French and Romanian. Or using 'England' to refer to the UK in its entirety (sorry, Tom and others).

Czechia has the highest Covid-19 rate of any country in the world, which is how I learned it (a story about how Arizona is the highest "entity" anywhere, with Czechia being the highest country).

Deaths per 100,000 are the only indicator that really matters imo and Czechia is up there but not all the way:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

I figured it had more to do with who gets tested. It was a story from an Arizona TV station that a friend posted on fb, so I knew it wasn't definitive.

should've gone with iCzech

Woss so bad about using holland

It’s actually Holland’s monster

No thats just a small town outside den haag iirc

denhaagiirc darraghmac

No such thing as an innocent synecdoche.

basically:

Holland is a region and former province on the western coast of the Netherlands. The name Holland is also frequently used informally to refer to the whole of the country of the Netherlands. This usage is commonly accepted in other countries and is also commonly employed by the Dutch themselves. However, some in the Netherlands, particularly those from regions outside Holland, may find it undesirable, even offensive or misrepresentative to use the term for the whole country.

Is Dutch itself problematic. I thought it derived from deutsche and therefore a complete misnomer. Looks like it dervish from an earlier term that ghats itself derives from. But looks like at least officially it's not liked because of connotations in English which are normally negative.

xp In addition to that: people outside of the Randstad/the region of Holland, use Holland as a derogatory term for said region.

I mean, Dutch is the funniest language I can think of.

Czechia and The Czech Republic are both very much like Holland in that they are names for the largest part of the country, excluding the rest. The problem is that that there is no common term like "The Netherlands" which also includes Moravia without including Slovakia.

in the NL case it’s not even the largest part but the historically dominant part

well largest by population anyway