Things you were shockingly old when you learned

And now I am eating a ginger biscuit. Life is good.

The woman in Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World is on the ground because the woman who inspired it had a degenerative muscular disorder and could not walk.

She was firmly against using a wheelchair, so she would crawl everywhere.

i found that out a week or two ago!

only a ginger
can call another ginger ginger

it hasn't the same sting over here, and anyway redhead is the more common word ime

now if one said the word ginger with 2 hard gs it sounds so much more derogatory dunnit.

Yes! That seems to be the preferred pronunciation for the noun form these days.

I've only recently taken on board how bonkers French history is. Monarchy, revolution, republic, coup, empire, monarchy, coup, empire, monarchy, revolution, monarchy, revolution, republic, empire, republic - all in under 100 years.

deems is that the Tim Minchin song or did he nick a folk saying?

I mis-read that as Tin Machine.

Your occasional reminder that the main villain in the Take On Me video (who pursues Morten Harket with a pipe wrench) is played by Philip Jackson, who was Chief Inspector Japp in Poirot. pic.twitter.com/hX4HsHCKLb

— Jason (@NickMotown) January 30, 2022

!

No feckin' way!

Grendel isn’t a dragon

My dad called me today to inform me that "Tangled Up in Blue" is a series of sonnets.

I'll have to check that out! It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I took a look and it kind of works! Not the meter, I don't think, and the rhyme scheme is similar but not the same. But it does (arguably) divide into sections of three quatrains followed by a final couplet, as in a Shakespearean sonnet.

Though to make this work you have to consider the last line Dylan sings before "tangled up in blue" - e.g. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view" to be two lines, the last line of the third quatrain and the first line of the couplet. "We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point/ of view / tangled Up in blue."

James Williamson and Ron Asheton were in the same band at different times as early as the mid 60s. Hadn't realised until Williamson posted a photo of the Chosen Few from his time and said that.
He did apparently meet Asheton and Pop because of taht band though. BUt Asheton joined on bass after Williamson left.

That there's a UK Dennis the Menace in addition to our US Dennis the Menace... he seems more willfully naughty than the U.S. version.

The weird part is that they were both first published on March 12th, 1951; apparently just a coincidence.

Yeah, we got the US Dennis over here as an animated series, but he was just “Dennis”

And I think the UK version is titled "Dennis and Gnasher" outside the UK

the notoriously litigious DC Thomson must have been really fucked off. I joined the Dennis The Menace fan club and all I got was two badges and a membership card. The furry Gnasher badge was not very well made iirc.

Until recently I thought "consumption" (as it often appeared in old literature and movies, as in "she died of consumption") was a euphemism for alcohol-related illness, as opposed to it being just another name for tuberculosis

It might make up for learning just last month that the lyric is "Split up on a dark, sad night" not "Split up on the docks that night".

I just now learned that from reading your post.

I'm not an expert on rock festival history, but I was surprised to learn that Lou Rawls was one of the performers at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Liam is short for William

Ope! I did not know that!

I learned something today and thought of this thread but I forgot what it was.

Billy Gallagher.

Liam and Topher Hemsworth

The Muppet's Statler and Waldorf are named after the New York hotels.

I knew Waldorf is a hotel, but didn't know of Statler, so just thought it was a random name they chose.

One could also say The Statler Brothers were indirectly named after the Statler hotel chain, since they were named after a brand of facial tissue that was named after the Statler Hotel in Boston.

That wildebeests are the same thing as gnus

Things you never gnu

...and things you never wil

(debeest)

I thought that was a blunderbuss.

"no gnus is good gnus"--gary gnu

I'm a sucker for a solid Great Space Coaster reference

You gotta be shockingly old to know that show.

:(

all i'll say is it will soon be legal for me to open the ilxors in their 50s thread.

welcome to the bracket

Yesterday I learned that in American football offensive and defensive "lines" have totally different players who take and leave the field in turn, and have no overlap of people. I thought it was like soccer where you have the same players and a bench of alternates.

I went to every high school home game for 5 years in the '90s and I just never...noticed?

A lot of high school teams used to have "two-way" players. I understand that it's less common nowadays, but not unheard of.

Arena Football actually did the two-way thing for years before they started allowing limited substitutions, to become more like traditional american football.

it also sucked

I was like "Who are those players looking sweaty on the sidelines, is that in real time? Shouldn't they be...playing?"

get on board for the great space coaster to your sixties

Hey I loved Great Space Coaster! And Krofft Superstars as well. Both in constant after-school syndication rotation circa 1981. Gary Gnu melds seamlessly into Sigmund the Sea Monster in my head.

Stations programmed shows in complementary pairs, and these pairings became irrelevant after cable and subsequently streaming. I feel these pairings should be documented before all us Olds lose our brains to dementia.

For me: Happy Days with Laverne & Shirley. I Dream of Jeannie with Bewitched. Flipper with Gidget. Green Acres with Beverly Hillbillies. Jeffersons with Good Times. What's Happening, Diff'rent Strokes, and Sanford & Son are also in this mix. (Fuck you, Cosby, you didn't pioneer shit.)

Alice with One Day at a Time, plus Facts of Life and Family Ties. Knight Rider with Magnum PI. Sometimes Kojak or Hawaii 5-0 or Matlock are in this mix. Then there's Greatest American Hero, Wonder Woman, etc.

Then the cartoon shows like He-Man and She-Ra (usually paired). Speed Racer and Jonny Quest.

A vanished world of lying on a terrible carpet eating something indefensible, every afternoon, all afternoon. Saturday morning was worse.

And we're now the parents who are supposed to limit "screen time"?

The "Soul Train" intro was the signal that Saturday morning cartoons were over.