Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Ha ha - you're right. I would have doubted they'd make up a correspondence in another newspaper, but "University of Thatcham" is a giveaway (no such institution). Weird April fool!

I quite enjoyed Don Valliparque

If you have 99 bottles, there's no need to take one down and pass it around. Just give everyone their own bottle. Much more hygienic and more efficient.

Each person can pour some beer into their own glass, mug or tankard. Alternatively, if the room is crowded with up to 100 people, passing the bottles back is a far more efficient distribution system than for each person to make their way to the bar, shelf or wall.

passing bottles through a bunch of hot hands is a good way to make wall-warm beer even less appetizing by the time it reaches the back of the crowd.

what if you're several meters underground, and the wall is the hewn face of the living rock?

"After the colon: the words before the colon considered in context."

I want to read this paper, sad it's not real ;_;

99 dead police on the wall

"Syxthene boetell gryne
Yhangen, Yhangen
Yhangen, Yhangen
Syxthene boetell gryne
Doonfal won
Syxthene boetell gryne
Yhangen, Yhangen
An . . ."

Shouldn't the last "Syxthene" be "Fyfthene?"

Who's the fool now, eh, National Post?

Another revelation regarding "Sixty Minute Man" by the Dominoes: I'd long known that another group, the Du Droppers, offered a cheeky sequel-song riposte, "Can't Do Sixty No More." But who would have guessed that the Dominoes themselves, four years after the original hit, would record an entirely different sequel song also titled "Can't Do Sixty No More"? Theirs keeps the tune of the original song, but the Du Droppers did a better job matching its sound. So strange.

Du Droppers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_F-RusZtQ

Dominoes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8PJD0zUqM

the....Du-Droppers

Persia is Iran - that is, it's an older name for exactly the same country, not some area roughly but not exactly coterminous.

A mobile phone's live camera image makes a good mirror. Or substitute. Hadn't really thought about it but somebody just groomed their hair a few seats in front of me that way.
Guess if you do it frequently it becomes 2nd nature to have the viewpoint slightly out.

that fucking Brooker was a co-founder of the CeX chain.

:-O

!

what!

it does say this on Wikipedia, but following the references it seems likely he was just one of the first people working there rather than being one of the owners

“So that was Music and Video Exchange, and a guy ended up going off to set up CEX so I was working there - I did some comic strip adverts for them, because when they found out I was a cartoonist they’d get me to do cartoons for them. And they’d appear in various magazines, and one of them was PC Zone which was based round the corner.

Started by Robert Dudani (Drinking Buddy), Paul Farrington (Gig Buddy), Hugh Man (Zen Buddy), Charlie Brooker (Cynical Student Type Buddy), Oli Smith (Genius Buddy) and Oliver Ball (The Consigliere).

That Charlie Brooker worked in the Notting Hill Music and Video Exchange, although it seems to have been in the games shop so I wouldn't have had to endure his moroseness - just the sparkling upbeat wit of the bods who inhabited the music branches.

That appletiser is literally just carbonated apple juice.

haha.

i remember my brother not realizing that salad cream was different to mayonaisse when he was about 20. my friend and i who were with him were very perplexed. it has a whole different name, why would it be the same thing?

Today, at age 32, I learned that there's a condiment called "salad cream"

it's a british thing. somewhat like miracle whip but yellowish in colour and perhaps more vinegary

I tried miracle whip once, it tasted like bad Asian low-cal mayonnaise. love salad cream, but grew up on it, don't think I tasted mayonnaise until I was in my mid-teens

Persia is Iran - that is, it's an older name for exactly the same country, not some area roughly but not exactly coterminous.

― In the wastelands of Birmingham and Manchester, massages are back (ledge)

Yeah, most Iranian immigrants in the states refer to themselves as Persian - we associate 'Iran' and 'Iranian' with the Ayatollah

esp Jewish ones aiui

(only 3% or so of the Persian Jewish population still lives in Iran)

^This gets really complicated.

Like, there are the 'Jadid al-Islam' (fake Muslims, literally "new Muslims") who were converted to Islam by force, for example in Mashhad in the 1800's. Some became 'crypto-Jews' and continued to practice Judaism secretly.

Then there are others who, like my parents, fled to Iran from other Arab states after the formation of Israel and maybe added -pour to their surnames to blend in. We're "fake Persians" as well as "fake Muslims". It's all very muddled. Like, if 3% of Persian Jews still live in Iran, who exactly does this account for

no idea tbf I just read the wikipedia infobox, do tell

Just saying i don't see how it's really possible to calculate this. I assume it's a guesstimate of the number of Jews in present day Iran who openly identify as Jewish as compared to the number of Jews in Persia of whatever nationality who openly identified as Jewish in 1978, but that's a potentially misleading figure.

Quite apart from the complex question of who counts as Jewish, or of who counts as Persian, Jews in Iran were not necessarily eager to out themselves in the mid 19th c, let alone the late 20th c

There's also the matter of record keeping, I have aunts and uncles who don't know when their birthday is.

microsoft office informed me yesterday that use of the word "farsi" is potentially offensive

That "hung like a donkey" is from the Bible (Ezekiel 23:20).

"Jizz like a horse" also in the same verse.

Wasn't Ba'athist Iraq fairly tolerant of Jews? I remember hearing that somewhere

No, no they weren't:

Almost all the rest follow after the public hangings of "Israeli spies" in 1969 by the Baath party, which had just come to power off the back of a coup.

"Promotion of Zionism" was punishable by death and that legislation has remained unchanged.

There are currently fewer than five jews in Iraq.

All I was trying to do was make a really stupid joke, but Google wouldn't let me.

https://i.imgur.com/jUJWABW.png

Uh kind of stereotyped there, Google

My paternal great uncle was executed in Baghdad in 1950, after that they "converted" and split and for Tehran in 1951. They were long gone by the time the Baathists took over anyhow- i doubt if many Jews were left in Iraq in the late 60's. Prior to 1948, they were hardly "tolerated" but not quite persecuted. My grandfather used to tell me all the time about how segregated Baghdad was before all this.

I don't think "Farsi" is offensive but we call it Persian

Gonna take a break from discussing this.

Sorry mom's family left in '51.
Dad's family left in '57 so that would mean my great uncle was executed in 56 if it makes a difference.

In 57 they had to bribe officials just to be allowed to leave. In 51 they could just leave.

The Shining was released in the US on the same week as The Empire Strikes Back but was outgrossed by a third pop cultural powerhouse which was also released that week. The name of that third film? The Gong Show Movie. And that's the rest of the story. Good day!

I think that was because The Shining was initially released only in LA and NYC (10 screens altogether). It was released nationwide three weeks later.

While I was vaguely aware that Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman had been married, I had no idea about the actual details of their short-lived nuptial bliss:

Borgnine's marriage to singer Ethel Merman in 1964 lasted only 42 days. Their time together was mostly spent hurling profane insults at each other, and both later admitted that the marriage was a colossal mistake (Merman's description of the marriage in her autobiography was a solitary blank page). Their divorce was finalized on May 25, 1965.