Things you were shockingly old when you learned

yeah i guess it's no more arbitrary than the UK being an hour different from spain

Franco changed Spain from GMT to Central European Time in 1940 and it was never changed back. I suppose France is in the same boat there - in terms of difference between clock time and solar time - and should maybe also be using GMT also.

so you might have spain on one, and france on the other? no way

you might have forgotten the US and Canada's melange of timezones, but let me introduce you to Australia, which in summer has six different time zones, one of which is half an hour off from its neighbours, one state which never goes onto DST, one territory that also never does, and a weird pocket within one state that is forty-five minutes off the hour

Let us not speak of Indiana

My terrible idea: set the whole world to a single time zone and it's either dark at 2pm or it isn't dealwithit.gif

I've had this idea before. universal time. it's the same time everywhere all the time and you just get used to what time it is where you are. so you're like 'damn I'm up late, it's 4pm" and you're just used to it

Swatch tried that in 1998, without overwhelming success. It may not have helped that they made it decimal and called it "Internet Time".

That scene in the TZ episode "To Serve Man" when the reporter (I think) is on the ship and he demands "What time is it on earth?" will finally make sense.

GMT still works!

"In an oral history, Fred Silverman said he landed on the name Scooby-Doo after hearing Frank Sinatra singing the familiar riff from his 1966 hit “Strangers in the Night.”: do-be-do-be-do."

Strangers in the night, where are you?
We've got some glances to exchange now

That Nick Gilder and Bryan Adams were in a band together?!?

Oh weird, I just noticed the Scooby-Doo trivia a few posts up, which harkens back to my recent discovery that this song pre-dates the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdbI7fuE_x0

W.E.B du Bois had a more unsung brother called Schubert so Webby doo bwa hada brother who close friends called Shooby doo bwa.
LIttle known fact like

Melanie Griffith was married to Antonio Banderas, and *twice* to Don Johnson, and Dakota Johnson is their kid! Anyone following basic tabloid news would know this but these four celebrities have never been filed anywhere near each other in my brain. I did at least know Griffith was Tippi Hedren's daughter, thanks to Roar.

Are you inside my brain? I went looking up Melanie Griffith's family the day before yesterday (couldn't remember which out of her and Goldie Hawn had which parents/children)

melanie griffith, mauled by a lion because her mom was crazy.

Now I’m terrified of poison ivy. Nettle rash is quite tame by comparison, passing very quickly.

This is true, but don't go groping random plants on a walk in the UK either, because giant hogweed can fuck you up. https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2019/06/giant-hogweed-facts/

(It grows along the riverbanks here and gets pretty tall and close to the path in summer, as do the nettles - though looking at the above page I'm wondering if the stuff I've seen might be common hogweed and not giant after all, but I'm still going to try not to touch it)

Turn and run
Nothing can stop them
Around every river and canal their power is growing
Stamp them out
We must destroy them
They infiltrate each city with their thick dark warning odor
They are invincible
They seem immune to all our herbicidal battering

wow, kinder! freaky. my partner and i just watched Something Wild and i looked up her Wiki.

That confidant and confidante are masculine and feminine forms (I think I just thought they were alternative spellings)

Some common surnames in other languages that are (more or less) exact translations of the word 'smith':

Hungarian = Kovács
Polish = Kowal(ski)
Russian = Kuznets(ov)
Portuguese = Ferreiro/Ferreira
Spanish = Herrero/Herrera

it took me years of posting here to finally figure out what xpost meant. esp since I didn't use Usenet much and they used it slightly differently anyway

(obv I have known what it means for the last few years, but my first few years i thought it was someone saying "excellent post", which wouldn't make sense when it followed text like "you fucking idiot, go play in traffic")

similarly for ages I thought smh stood for so much hate
don't know where I got that idea from but it fit, even if it made posts seem more aggressive

i thought rmde was "rub my damn ears"

restore 'rollin my damn eyes' plz u bastards
good times

I've heard a lot of adults say "mischievious," it must be a very common mistake.

I say "buoyed" like "booyd" and "buoyant" like "boyant".

― Maria, Thursday, 13 November 2008 16:34 (twelve years ago) link

I've just heard Captain Kirk AND Spock say 'mischievious' in a Star Trek episode.

ffs

It obviously became Standard English in the future.

the long influence of "Ebeneezer Goode"

mischievious is the aluminium of mischievous

Grievious misuse imo

Mischievious seems to be popular with people I know from the Indianapolis area.

Maybe that's where Spock's ancestors were from.

The Indianapolis 500-years-from-now

Indianapioulis

I just learned today that a president can pardon himself (I think I knew that) and do so without announcing it (definitely didn't know that).

Can he pardon himself in anticipation though? I mean, he isn't (yet) under investigation for any federal crimes is he?

According to John Dean--I know--he can pardon himself in advance, as an insurance policy, and not in any way make it public.

I thought it was supposed to be debatable grey area and fun things like that. An admission of guilt as well.
If it is true then it needs to be looked at. Needs the turtle blockage of the Senate to be removed too surely.

I found the conversation from yesterday on CNN transcripts.

BROWN: Right. And I just want to go back to this and we'll go back to Flynn. But sources I've spoken to close to the president, John, they backed down the idea he would ever issue a self-pardon because it would be essentially admitting wrongdoing, admitting criminal wrongdoing in their view and president would never want to do that.

Do you really think he would? DEAN: Well, that -- that's a good question. He might, as an insurance

policy, want to stick one in his pocket, and not announce that he had done it, a self-pardon. But there is no question, a pardon is -- to accept a pardon is to acknowledge guilt. There is a Supreme Court case on that.

In fact, Gerald Ford, after he pardoned Nixon, carried a little slip of paper with a quote from the relevant Supreme Court ruling that he could pull out when anybody asked him why he was giving Nixon this pass. He said, well, Nixon admitted guilt when he accepted the pardon which is true.

So, that's what Trump is worried about. That's why he wouldn't announce it. If he were ever indicted, that's his -- that's his check, that is his ability to say, hey, you can't prosecute me because I have self-pardoned.

[16:50:01]

Then we'd litigate that issue for probably several years.

BROWN: So, you're saying essentially in the dark of the night, he could pardon himself, no one would -- no one would know? Is that what you're saying? Of course, this is speculative.

DEAN: He could do that.

BROWN: OK, OK.

DEAN: He does not have it announce it.

BROWN: OK.

DEAN: He does not have it announce it.

Should've edited that, but it's clear enough.

He doesn't have to announce it, but it wouldn't be a secret for long.

I don't think the "admitting guilt" thing would stop him from self-pardoning; he would just claim he's doing it to protect America from all the fake hoax Democrat Socialist prosecutions of your favorite president.

Better be able to get him on something else he can't pardon
Obstruction of the last couple of weeks should be bad enough. & he had been criminģ when he's not been golfing so surely there must be something not covered. has he combined the 2 at any point.
Surely he'll be back to criming as soon as he's left office too. Will he be able to project a pardon forward.

Christmas Island isn't in the middle of the Pacific somewhere, but a bit south of Java.

Imagine how much more the concentration camps would cost the taxpayer if they were that far away. You really didn't think it through.

Fair I guess (Nauru though?)

That 'send them to coventry' is an actual English idiom and not just the title of Pa Salieu's mixtape.