Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Sam Neill is from Northern Ireland

― Number None, Monday, July 22, 2019 10:07 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

OK now you're just fucking with me.

Jackie Chan is Welsh

you'll be telling us Max Boyce was from Hong Kong next!

born there during the Sevens tournament iirc

I learned just now that Phil Rudd is the only member of either main AC/DC lineup who was born in Australia.

a real one is I didn't know the Van Halen brothers were half Indonesian - learned recently from Dave Roth interview on Marc Maron pod

Ha, I learned that from an ethnomusicology prof in undergrad. I remember a fellow student tried to seriously consider whether there was an audible gamelan influence in their playing.

I learned just now that Phil Rudd is the only member of either main AC/DC lineup who was born in Australia.

Mark Evans was born in Australia!


I just this minute learned that 'Quebecois' refers to someone from Hong Kong. Thanks, sic!

I just this minute learned that the words “or something” don’t exist

Ah, fair point. Evans played on probably my favourite AC/DC records during the two years he was in the band.

John "Love Is" Paul

oh duh, as in not a Young brother, that totally threw me in a “puns you had missed” fashion

Palmolive (the cleaning product, not the musician) was so named for the stunningly obvious reason that the original soap contained both palm oil and olive oil.

in a similar vein, Castrol GTX has caster oil in it, made from the beans.

xpost Whoa. Always just assumed that was somebody's weird last name.

non-xpost Whoa x2.

I learned last night that BBC sitcom This Country does not star Mackenzie Crook, it's some other guy who looks a bit like him. Crook is in a BBC sitcom set in the countryside, but it's a different one.

Only just realised, on the death of Art Neville, that the Neville Brothers essentially grew out of The Meters and didn't release anything under that name until the late 70s. Bit shocked at myself there really.

Speaking of oils, in Oil of Olay the "Olay" (or Ulay or Ulan or Olaz depending on your territory) means nothing at all, although its inventor was trying to play off the word "lanolin."

Same with Häagen-Dazs, which is a completely meaningless assemblage of phonemes.

"Reuben Mattus invented the 'Häagen-Dazs' name supposedly as a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War,[5] and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels."

I reckon I had been cooking for 20 years before I realised "deglazing" was dissolving the brown crust forming in the pan using a liquid. Before that I had thought it meant using some kind of alcohol to disperse the cooking oil so the dish wasn't greasy.

Rhododendron honey ain't good for you.
Heard taht yesterday, and people actually try to keep their honeybees away from the plant.
Cos it has Grayanotoxins in it.

It was a side comment in a This Podcast Will Kill You on Belladonna.
Interesting podcast if you like hearing about diseases.

Cut back some rhododendron a few weeks ago and burned it last week. The smoke was beyond foul, maybe this is why. Am I going to die now?

Nagasaki being the only port in Japan open to the outside world for 200 years. Or even more narrowly the island of Dejima in the Nagasaki harbour.
JUst got the Nagasaki bit from open University.
I assume it contributed to why it was chosen as one of the bomb targets in 1945.

nah

nagasaki was a secondary target if they failed to see the primary through cloud cover, which happened. armaments manufacturing was the stated reason

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the David Mitchell book, is set on Dejima during this period.

On a similar "good things actually bad for you" tip a lot of ppl dont seem to know that raw kale/chard is really not a good idea, because in its raw state its loaded with oxalic acid.

Uncured bacon is "no nitrates (except those naturally occurring in celery salt)" which may be significantly higher in nitrates than normal cured bacon is, btw

Ha yeah same with MSG. It occurs naturally in like, tomatoes and soy sauce and things so anyone saying theyre allergic is likely talking bollox

uh, MSG is literally the main neurotransmitter used in the brain, and we have taste receptors (umami) evolved specifically to detect it because it signifies "good food here". That's why it gets added. Every culture has a high-natural-MSG additive - fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, konbu kelp, Vegemite, Parmesan / Grana Padano cheese, etc etc.
The one study that found it was dangerous was literally injecting MSG into the brain of a rat - guess what, if you inject a ton of neurotransmitter the brain goes crazy. MSG fear is pure myth.

I get annoyed with restaurants boasting about "No MSG" too. It will stop me eating there every time.

Nitrates, however, those do actually seem to be pretty unhealthy while being perfectly natural. You can get genuinely nitrate-free bacon in the UK now, bit expensive but not bad.

I remember the short films on chinese cooking that used to be used as filler on Channel 4 afternoon shows in the 80s where they used to pile on more and more MSG. Not sure if that's anything to go by for actual Asian cooking at the time but it did seem excessive.

I've just noticed the hearts on Morrissey's top in the Salford Lads Club picture.

MSG is literally the main neurotransmitter used in the brain

Some people report getting severe headaches when they eat food with MSG added. Seems like these two facts might somehow be related to one another.

I guess there is a chance that circulating glutamate could contract some blood vessels, which is the basis of headache (the brain itself has no pain receptors) but if glutamate got into the brain via the blood, you'd have a seizure after every meal.

I also had a quick look at a review of studies of MSG headache. Of all the available studies, those which reported headache used MSG concentrations so high (way higher than food addition) that the subjects could easily taste the MSG, so they were inadequately blinded - i.e. psychological belief could not be ruled out. In the studies which were blinded and used food levels of MSG, no evidence has been found.

Wasnt the other one people claiming it gave them asthma? Which has to be a bit bollocks.

There's a very good This Anwrican Life episode about the origins of the MSG panic

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript

True fact, Melbourne, Australia has a higher proportion of people’s talking bollocks about food allergies than pretty much any city on the planet.

anyone else feel the compulsion to read interesting medical studies when a hypothesis is in play?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136011/

The blood-brain barrier and glutamate

The non-English lyrics in Lionel Richie's 'All Night Long' are a combination of actual words (http://bonvivantva.com/?p=4943) and total gibberish:

The song lyrics were written primarily in English, but Richie has admitted in at least one press interview that "African" lyrics in the song, such as "Tom bo li de say de moi ya," and "Jambo jumbo," were in fact made-up gibberish of his own invention.[3] Richie has described these portions of the song as a "wonderful joke," written when he discovered that he lacked the time to hire a translator to contribute the foreign-language lyrics he wished to include in the song.[4]

eh

i wouldnt be inviting close inspection of a lot of the gaeilge content of some of the websites of dept x i mean what even is language anyway right

Rejected lyric: frusen gladje haagen-dazs, fahrvergnugen jambo jambo!

Rejected lyric: Fremme neppe venette?

...gunter glieben glauten globen...

Richie has admitted in at least one press interview that "African" lyrics in the song, such as "Tom bo li de say de moi ya," and "Jambo jumbo," were in fact made-up gibberish of his own invention.

Cocaine is a...

xps that's a useful review mf - if anyone wants a tl;dr it's that the only way glutamate crosses the blood-brain barrier is being transported *out* of the brain environment into the blood, except at a few points where there are open walled blood vessels used to sample blood contents to e.g. decide if you need to eat. These spots are well policed and have zero to do with headache or asthma. Not to be a dick about it but I'm a working neuroscientist and I've given lectures on glutamate handling in the brain for the last decade, including one yesterday.

and thank you! mh for finding that review, as you can imagine it's a frequent question. Not sure why I wrote "mf" above but not on purpose!

That Blues Traveler aren't a blues band, also that they spell Traveller with one l

Ha, I always forget the US spellings of those words.

I wrote "levelling" on the UK politics thread earlier and couldn't remember if it was "levelling" (UK iirc) or "leveling" (US iirc) because at least the US has a rule whereas the British rule is "just remember it" afaik

(I think there is a rule in USEng, anyway - "aver" has the stress on -"er" so in the US it's averring but "waver" has the stress on "wav" so it's "wavering", iirc?)

same as there is no rule for -ent and -ant except "just remember it from all the books you've read, what do you mean you spend more time reading Joe Public's unedited thoughts on twitter than reading the classics" with a little dash of "just remember it from your knowledge of etymology and Latin verb conjugations"

and there is no rule for -er vs -or except "maybe it depends on when the word was imported and whether it came from French or Latin or just because people wanted to add -er to a word, oh hell, make it up already"

the truly galaxy brain people do the same with -ise/-ize except s/Latin/Greek/ of course (taps nose)