Things you were shockingly old when you learned

That turning a gas hob knob fully anticlockwise brings the flame right down without extinguishing it.

the existence of gas hob nobs

Colossus of Bhridges

I just got this terrible* dad joke now that I am 6 days older than when I first read it

* I say this lovingly

also re Flim/MILF, a couple of years before Flim and maybe 5 before American Pie I decided I liked a band called Milf and wrote their name on my school science folder. So I hope nobody knew the acronym them, and I also hope the band was named after something else tbh.

The stupidest part is I'm not even sure I'd heard the band or if I'd just read a review that sounded cool and decided I should like them. Hey, I was 14, but perhaps this is why normal people don't performatively pretend to like things they don't know anything about? Fairly sure I learned that lesson unusually late in life too.

also I was like 30 when someone showed me the gas hob thing after many years of accidentally turning the hob off in the middle of something. yeah, it's v useful

Oh, I knew going in that it was an indefensibly-terrible dad joke. Thank u for recognizing the effort.

Hey, I was 14, but perhaps this is why normal people don't performatively pretend to like things they don't know anything about? Fairly sure I learned that lesson unusually late in life too.

― a passing spacecadet

I think everyone does this as a teenager as do many adults

it's good not bad

I've only half accepted that that bit at the end of podcast and radio advertising where the T&C's are read on helium is actually sped up and not performed by a cabal of people who can speak at twice the normal human speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M

xp

On a similar note, I learned recently that it's a common thing for people to listen to podcasts on 1.5x or 2x speed to get through them faster.

I do this with ploddingly read audiobooks

> listen to podcasts on 1.5x or 2x speed

they also did this with subtitled VHS films in microserfs

oh there are weirdos out there who do it with TV shows too

i only listen to podcasts on 0.5x so i can savour every word

oh there are weirdos out there who do it with TV shows too

networks do this too with syndicated old sitcoms to squeeze more hernia mesh commercials in.

haha i listen to podcasts on 1.2x because i don't wanna notice it's sped up, i just wanna trick myself into have like 6 more mminutes a day to listen to a different podcast

oh there are weirdos out there who do it with TV shows too

Hey Duggee at 1.3x speed is the best show on iplayer fyi

I listened to a German audiobook at 0.9 speed and felt only 0.81 times as stupid as I did when completely failing to understand it at 1.0

You can also change the play speed of the clips on porn sites for a more efficient wank. I’ve heard.

Lifehack!

I listen to podcasts at 2x speed. They need to invent a player that automatically identifies music and goes to 1x for that because manual adjusting is not fun when I’m listening through the desert island discs archive.

I also can’t tell anymore if Marc Maron actually normally sounds a bit slow in 1x real life or if it’s just me being used to listening to him like he’s taken a line or two before the show.

Marlon Brando had no Italian ancestry and was in fact *German! The surname Brando being derived from Brandau!

(*in the American sense)

I bet plenty of those O'Malley's are derived from Mallenstein as well. it reminds me of the indisputably Jewish James Caan winning some Italian-American of the year award once iirc.

With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey.

... and that's just the self-reported ones. My dad, who had a dislike of Americans, apart from John F. Kennedy, was always saying they're just Germans really.

He had a lot of strange notions though.

Needless to say he disliked Germans too but his attitude towards them softened somewhat when he went to work there for a while and realized how many of them were Catholics.

my mum said something similar to me about the US St Patrick's Day parade recently, and I tend to agree with her on this, despite it perhaps being a slightly a wrong or unusual notion - fuck the plastic 3rd reich-paddies!

lol

I have long suspected most of them to be secretly, to use deems' preferred term, Scotch.

After all, as I think (hope) most of us realize, those US Presidents who claim Irish ancestry are usually descended from Scots who were given plantations in Ireland to fuck over the Irish and then exported the family business of fucking people over to Americay.

That Amazon women warriors were not from Brazil.

I mean, sure, there may be some female fighters living on that South American river, but I'm talking about the ones who raised Wonder Woman and went to the Moon.

I'm sure we've had that one before!

"The word Amazon itself may be derived from the Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- "(one) fighting together"[19] or ethnonym *ha-mazan- "warriors", a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria's gloss "ἁμαζακάραν· πολεμεῖν. Πέρσαι" ("hamazakaran: 'to make war' in Persian"), where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root *kar- "make" (from which Sanskrit karma is also derived).[20]" some off-the-pojnt scholarship from the wikipedia entry on the amazon river

(it's called the amazons bcz some 16th-century spanish bloke was attacked by local warriors led by women, and was shook enough to remember his classical education)

Not that this is something I should have known years ago, but it's a question that comes up at least every Easter time.

In a bag of Spice Jelly Beans or Gum Drops, there's usually cinnamon, spearmint, peppermint, wintergreen, licorice and clove (my favorite), but sometimes there's this weird ass 7th flavor that nobody's ever been able to identify. Vaguely medicinal, probably some old flavor like horehound or whatever Moxie is made out of.

Anyway, I finally Googled it, and there's 2 different flavors. Some brands have sassafras, some (Brach's) have ginger.

Okay I don't really know what you're talking about, but I want in.

Also otm about clove.

weird ass flavor that nobody's ever been able to identify: … ginger

you hate 2 read it

irl giggle

my life experience with jazz is highly mediated and/or studio stuff and i totally failed to anticipate immediate applauses during performance after solos. i was able to understand why/what i was seeing, but not having seen it, i was all "is this a thing? like, a not unusual/not rude thing?"

i personally find it rude when people don't whoop "GET IT!!!" after a particularly hard swinging solo

Genius and GZA are the same person and Liquid Swords is not a collab album

We had a mini “fringe festival” here on Sunday and one comedian I saw (who was quite good) had a bit based around how shockingly old she was when she learnt that the numbers on a toaster refer to minutes - this is definitely one of those things that when ppl first hear they say things like “mind blown” and then tell others about it to see if they were alone in not knowing about it, also it is notably not actually really true at all. I had to restrain myself from doing the world’s most irritating heckle

The person who directed "Like Water for Chocolate" and "A Walk in the Clouds" (among others) is the same guy who played Gen. Mapache's "accountant" in "The Wild Bunch," Alfonso Arau.

numbers on toasters don't refer to minutes and also that's the absolute standard extremely common 'what didn't you realise' example, for some reason. along with the petrol cap indicator on cars, which admittedly I hadn't realised and is comparatively interesting.

numbers on toasters don't refer to minutes and also that's the absolute standard extremely common 'what didn't you realise' example, for some reason

Yeah that’s what I’m saying!

I learned numbers on toasters don't refer to minutes just now

I learned some people think the numbers on toasters refer to minutes just now.

it would never have occurred to me

never trust anything that has numbers but not an indicator of the units

Just learned the "Cranes in the Sky" Solange sings about are not the birds.