Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Yes, the bassist Lindsay Cooper was a man.

that lindsay cooper and the OTHER robert calvert both play on this which caused me no little confusion initially

went to visit some silkmaker cousins when i was small & got to see the worms in the basement, all spread out on long, rimmed tables layered with mulberry leaves. we stood there quietly and listened to the tiny munching sounds of all those silkworms.

this was in italy a few years after chernobyl. none of the silk was any good because it came out of the worms in blobs rather than threads.

spider silk! stronger than steel!! it's a bit too tricky to farm spiders, tho, due to their carnivorous and cannibalistic nature <3 somebody-or-other went to the trouble once and they even devised a device to milk their silk, like a tiny stocks for spiders to hold them in place while a squeezy thing exerted "gentle" pressure on their abdomens. :/

a beautiful shawl of spider silk:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/47880dd8b72246a147f58a2435e0cda4604d75ba/0_139_4256_2554/master/4256.jpg?width=1200&height=900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=39f0a4e67050d2f2b043573dd14c5ed3

gotta shout out banana silk here -- lustrous, robust, and (afaik) no spiders are squeezed nor larvae boiled to produce it. i suppose the process of stripping off that outer layer of banana palm bark for its fibers could disrupt the lives of various beings that make their homes there, but at least it's just incidental destruction?

i must confess a weakness for 𝓈𝑒𝒶 𝓈𝒾𝓁𝓀 here, despite never having met any in person. first of all, that name! mermaids' ball gowns can be made from nothing else, right? "sea silk". just brilliant. (also called byssus, but that looks too much like bussy for me to take it seriously as a textile name) it's made from the hairy stuff that a mussel attaches itself to rocks with. you treat it with lemon juice and it turns golden. it can be woven into a fabric so fine that a pair of sea silk gloves can fit inside a walnut shell, allegedly. sleek sea silk. marvelous.

well anyway in keeping with the topic of the thread, i only learned a few years ago that rayon is made from wood.

cool post cat!

thanks matttkkkk!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ARecycle001.svg

The 3 arrows in the original recycling symbol are not identical--2 arrows fold over and 1 folds under, making it a moebius strip.

But recycling isn't an eternal loop though is it? There's some dimensions of loss.
Plus doesn't everything just get sent to Indonesia to destroy their environment, or is that just plastics.

or does the moebius element just highlight a fundamental physical flaw, that it doesn't quite work in this universe

I never realised until now that the question in the old “what’s brown and sticky” children’s gag is supposed to make you think it’s a poo.

I mean it’s so OBVIOUS NOW

but still

Just learnt that Ray Milland was Welsh.

!

I recently learned how to say his hometown in Welsh: Castell-nedd.

Man

Ha, wrong thread

man: also welsh

Really? Always thought it was Manx.

https://i.discogs.com/80Tg2M2Rfo0qpOc6kpXp9ifjYK1-PgJU_X9SehlQ3vs/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTMzMDgx/NDgtMTUzOTIwMzY5/Ny0yNjU0LmpwZWc.jpeg

I was today years old when I learned that Slade covered Moby Grape’s “Omaha”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LEA_kTO214

Lissen Ma Frenz

!

With this and the Move doing "Hey Grandma", it seems like Moby Grape an impression in the West Midlands at least! Imagining "Nayyyykid If Oi Want Tow" in my head.

*made an impression*

would rather make an impression than impact anything

https://i.discogs.com/vgg5oL-oJtp308OCjZAKhMcfRFD-WdDgJ1F6C3WlF-s/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:598/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQzNTk3/MjctMTM2Mjc3NjM5/OS01OTg3LmpwZWc.jpeg

i spent a good amount of time as a young person thinking that "thoroughfare" referred to food. i think i was likely in college, learning about haussmann and the boulevards, when i finally figured out my mistake. not sure that i ever encountered the above cover art, but it was definitely via bud powell's recording of the same tune on a blue note reissue CD that i encountered the word for the first time

hearty parisian thoroughfare

in college sports parlance, "Yukon" is actually University of Connecticut... and not some sports powerhouse in Northern Alaska that I had imagined

yes, but not spelled like that

I many not be shockingly old but have long wondered: is the Husky mascot a play on the Yukon/UConn thing or just coincidence?

I always assumed yes but wiki says no:

The university's teams are nicknamed "Huskies", a name adopted following a student poll in The Connecticut Campus in 1934 after the school's name changed from Connecticut Agricultural College to Connecticut State College in 1933; before then, the teams were referred to as the Aggies.[2] Although there is a homophonic relationship between "UConn" and the Yukon, where Huskies are native, the "Huskies" nickname predates the school's 1939 name change to the University of Connecticut; the first recorded use of "UConn" (as "U-Conn", both separately and with "Huskies") was later in 1939.

Wait until you hear about Case Western Reserve.

Learned yesterday that a courgette and a baby cucumber are not the same thing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_England

not sure i knew this, that England wasn't England until 927

Yeah even Alfred was only King of Wessex, though there were various "Bretwalda" in the previous few centuries.

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

Scotland appears to be older by 80-odd years.

GO YOU HUSKIES!

so for some reason I thought Rufus Wainwright had a French accent all this time, and then I hear him do an interview and...no, not at all. guess my confusion was the fact that he speaks French and often sings in French and I listened to his version of Hallelujah when I was younger and thought he had a thick French accent but listening now it's just folk-affectation and nothing more.

dum

last week i discovered that you can hang up on most smartphones by pressing the power button. no need to look at the screen.

Yep. Did that by mistake the other day and then had to call back and re-cycle through about 15 stages of menu to get to where I was. VERY annoying.

discovered a couple of weeks ago that lionel messi isn't french.

I hear Dawn French is rather messy.

Yeah even Alfred was only King of Wessex, though there were various "Bretwalda" in the previous few centuries.

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

― Camaraderie at Arms Length

yet no one told me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otrt0iH9ubw

Mind blown by this.

And of course my occasional reminder that it's called My Fair Lady as that's how Eliza would pronounce Mayfair. The greatest and most understated phonetic pun in any movie title.

— Mark Lamarr (@lamarr_mark) December 26, 2022

holy shit me too duh

Kenny Rogers started out playing bass and was pretty good at it.

lots of shots of him playing in this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B45NsDaUa8o

Thanks. There is a video on social media of him playing upright bass with Dudley Moore jamming on “Satin Doll” on The Tonight Show that is particularly interesting. He gets a little lost during his solo and laughs but mostly sounds pretty good. Also didn’t know that Mickey Jones was in The First Edition.

Dudley Moore & Kenny Rogers: Satin Doll https://t.co/puvu5WXLUr via @notreble

— Kenny Rogers (@_KennyRogers) January 7, 2018

appears unavailable here, but this is also good ("what're you doing New Year's Eve?"):

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

In the "unknown bassist" category, I read that Giorgio Moroder spent the first part of his career playing stand-up bass in jazz groups.