Things you were shockingly old when you learned

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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.

andrew m., Friday, 24 May 2019 14:02 (four years ago) link

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

km not doin typos anymore (Will M.), Friday, 24 May 2019 15:42 (four years ago) link

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

a passing spacecadet, Friday, 24 May 2019 16:00 (four years ago) link

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

a passing spacecadet, Friday, 24 May 2019 16:02 (four years ago) link

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

shhh / let peaceful like things (wins), Friday, 24 May 2019 16:05 (four years ago) link

Lifehack!

Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Friday, 24 May 2019 20:02 (four years ago) link

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.

fancy the Dirkishness of carrying Doré a round (fionnland), Friday, 24 May 2019 20:58 (four years ago) link

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

(*in the American sense)

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:27 (four years ago) link

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.

calzino, Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:37 (four years ago) link

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.

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:43 (four years ago) link

He had a lot of strange notions though.

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:44 (four years ago) link

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.

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:51 (four years ago) link

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!

calzino, Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:54 (four years ago) link

lol

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 09:55 (four years ago) link

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

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 10:00 (four years ago) link

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.

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 10:06 (four years ago) link

That Amazon women warriors were not from Brazil.

pplains, Saturday, 25 May 2019 14:45 (four years ago) link

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.

pplains, Saturday, 25 May 2019 14:46 (four years ago) link

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

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Saturday, 25 May 2019 14:53 (four years ago) link

"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)

mark s, Saturday, 25 May 2019 15:35 (four years ago) link

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.

Hideous Lump, Saturday, 25 May 2019 20:56 (four years ago) link

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

Also otm about clove.

Andrew Farrell, Saturday, 25 May 2019 21:07 (four years ago) link

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

you hate 2 read it

mark s, Saturday, 25 May 2019 21:09 (four years ago) link

irl giggle

tfw you are not easily whelmed (sic), Saturday, 25 May 2019 23:58 (four years ago) link

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?"

Hunt3r, Sunday, 26 May 2019 20:40 (four years ago) link

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

Lil' Brexit (Tracer Hand), Sunday, 26 May 2019 20:52 (four years ago) link

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

frame casual (dog latin), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 14:46 (four years ago) link

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

shhh / let peaceful like things (wins), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 16:19 (four years ago) link

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.

Plinka Trinka Banga Tink (Eliza D.), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 16:21 (four years ago) link

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.

kinder, Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:10 (four years ago) link

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!

shhh / let peaceful like things (wins), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:13 (four years ago) link

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

mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:16 (four years ago) link

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

Ned Caligari (Tom D.), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:31 (four years ago) link

it would never have occurred to me

don't mock my smock or i'll clean your clock (silby), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:44 (four years ago) link

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

mh, Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:49 (four years ago) link

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

Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 17:52 (four years ago) link

Otis Redding wrote "Respect"

flappy bird, Tuesday, 28 May 2019 18:22 (four years ago) link

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

this one is great

quelle sprocket damage (sic), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 18:48 (four years ago) link

Isn't every Wu-Tang production essentially a collab album though, when you really think about it?

Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, 28 May 2019 19:14 (four years ago) link

Willow and Jaden Smith are named after Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, which seems blindingly obvious written out like that, but stunned a dinner table on Sunday.

Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 28 May 2019 19:42 (four years ago) link

That there is an 'l' in the word vulnerable, just now. It still looks wrong. I think autocorrect has been fixing it for me for a decade or more.

mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, 29 May 2019 22:41 (four years ago) link

vunerabe

emil.y, Wednesday, 29 May 2019 22:57 (four years ago) link

Lol

Got your butt drank (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 29 May 2019 23:14 (four years ago) link

That there is an 'l' in the word vulnerable, just now. It still looks wrong. I think autocorrect has been fixing it for me for a decade or more.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, May 29, 2019 3:41 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark

wait til you find out you pronounce the first l

findom haddie (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 29 May 2019 23:17 (four years ago) link

This is mystifying to me

Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Wednesday, 29 May 2019 23:55 (four years ago) link

Boysenberries are -- to the best of our knowledge -- less than a century old and were first brought to market for commercial sale by William Knott of Knott's Berry Farm.

Pretty cool story actually

The exact origins of the boysenberry are unclear, but the most definite records trace the plant as it is known today back to grower Rudolph Boysen, who obtained the dewberry–loganberry parent from the farm of John Lubben.[5]

In the late 1920s, George M. Darrow of the USDA began tracking down reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on Boysen's farm in Anaheim, California.[6] Darrow enlisted the help of Walter Knott, another farmer, who was known as a berry expert. Knott had never heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search.

Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen's old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott's farm in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in Southern California.[6] He began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1932 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, "Boysenberries," after their originator.[7] His family's small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott's Berry Farm. As the berry's popularity grew, Mrs. Knott began making preserves, which ultimately made Knott's Berry Farm famous.

Number None, Monday, 3 June 2019 14:09 (four years ago) link

The boysenberry is a very recent example but it's amazing how many of our most popular fruits are hybrids, not (originally) wild species, including lemons, key limes/Mexican limes, Valencia oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines just to name a few. And our apples tend to be clones. All Granny Smith apples are clones of the fruit of a single Australian tree from 1868. Navel oranges are all clones too. (I learned all this on the shockingly late side).

Josefa, Monday, 3 June 2019 14:26 (four years ago) link

I perpetually forget and am reminded by a crop scientist friend that sweet potatoes are naturally transgenic -- the genome of every variety has some agrobacterium dna

nature beat us to genetic editing via bacteria by a long shot

mh, Monday, 3 June 2019 14:37 (four years ago) link


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