Things you were shockingly old when you learned

were you shockingly old when you learned the name of the worcestershire sauce company

So sorry: Leah & Perkings. Damn autocorrect.

I just heard another one! David Attenborough pronouncing “algae” Al Ghee as in:

What’s it all about
Algae

Whether you hard or ‘soft’ G*, it rhymes with Alfie, no?

* Algae (/ˈældʒi, ˈælɡi/; singular alga /ˈælɡə/)

Yes, sorry. That part belongs on another thread. #MoreThanOneThread

Attenborough has form - his pronunciation of 'orang utan' weirded me out.

aw-rang oo-tan?

Haha I switch between hard & soft g for algae, it is one of the words that I never know how I’m going to say until it comes out of my mouth

speaking of which I've been vaping a flavour called orang-o-tang this morning

A while back, there was a whole thing about how Benedict Cumberbatch can't say the word "penguin"

Won't more like.

I only recently learned that the Greyhawk Dungeons and Dragons setting is directly derived from Gary Gygax’s first D&D group—like, the characters are literally his son’s and friends’ and his own original player characters from their very first campaigns. When I was a kid I always wondered why they had two distinct “classic D&D” settings (Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms) without some kind of obvious gimmick to set one of them apart, the way every other 2.5/3rd edition setting had (like Ravenloft=horror, Dark Sun=desert, Dragonlance=totally dragon-centric, etc).

George Stephen Morrison (January 7, 1919 – November 17, 2008) was a United States Navy rear admiral (upper half) and naval aviator. Morrison was commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of August 1964, which sparked an escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. He was the father of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the rock band The Doors, who died in July 1971.

yeah like really ironic.Jimbo's dad caused the Vietnam war. How countercultural, well no wonder he wanted to kill him.
Or something like that.

mother... I want me tea!

is this something that's commonly known? I haven't seen the Oliver Stone movie or any documentary about Jim, seems like it should be a big deal in his story.

I would advise giving the Stone movie a very wide berth, it's worse than garbage. Lol iirc one of the JM childhood scenes was him having some kind of mystic soul transfer with a native Indian in the back of the family Chev!

I think the "sparked an escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War" bit might be slightly overstating his dad's role in Vietnam. The US anti-communism military industrial complex didn't rely on individual incidents to justify going full war on a country.

People you were shockingly old when you learned they were siblings dept: Angela Cartwright (Penny Robinson in the original Lost in Space series) / Veronica Cartwright (Lambert in Alien).

A bunch of 60s/70s counterculture-adjacent peeps had military dads. Morrison of course, John Denver, Stephen Stills, John Phillips, Frank Zappa. Zappa's manager and wife both had vague connections with Navy special ops.

A podcast called Lizard People did an episode on this; there is apparently a theory that the Laurel Canyon scene was invented by the CIA to distract the youth from Vietnam. Overlaps with MKULTRA.

As calzino notes, though, the war machine (and the drumbeat for war) was huge enough that it doesn't need esoteric and/or reductive explanations. It makes sense that 20somethings had dads in the military because millions of men were in the military.

George Washington is also sometimes said to have "caused" the French & Indian War by botching negotiations with French military outposts.

I knew his dad was an admiral or general or something, I didn't know until recently that he was at high school with Cass Elliot.

cass, iirc, was a sophomore - planned to go to swarthmore. but she changed her mind one day.

skimming this thread, was Mama Cass a Navy Seal?

Yes, Demi Moore played her in a movie

jk

no, but John Phillips's dad was a retired Marine Corps officer.

Further, Frank Zappa's father, Francis, had worked in chemical warfare at Aberdeen Proving Ground. His first wife had been a secretary for the Navy's special warfare office. And his first manager, Herb Cohen, had been (allegedly) involved in various overseas military shenanigans.

The obvious conclusion from this is that the CIA invented hippies.

Thus why Zappa hated hippies and preferred freaks!

no, but John Phillips's dad was a retired Marine Corps officer.

He also went to the same high school as Jim Morrison and Cass Elliot, though several years earlier.

Just found out a partial reason for why I've always been a bit hazy and confused on the regions of the Mediterranean and its surrounding lands: The ancient region of Ionia is nowhere near the Ionian sea! The former is ~ the west coast of today's Turkey, the latter between the footsole of Italy and western Greece.

I feel like a complete maroon, but the other day, I learned that the word "jagoff" has nothing to with masturbation. Because I'm not from Pittsburg.

so what is it from?

Ursula Le Guin & Philip K. Dick went to Berkeley High School at the same time, but didn't know each other

Probably for the best

Ursula Le Guin and John Steinbeck once got drunk under a bush together at a wedding. (I learned that one from her last essay collection.)

That Sting’s “Englishman in New York” is not autobiographical.

brace yourself for some followup news about Shinehead

that there are lots of people (guessing this is a US thing?) on the internet who do not let their cats go outside, ever, and are SHOCKED AND APPALLED that some other people do.

lol whaT?

the cat owning equivalents of people who keep their dogs in cages and always on the lead.

even if you were a cat owner in some crazy mega-city where you daren't let them out it should be comprehensible that other owners have a cat flap and it's all good.

my dad lives in a bungalow in rural Herefordshire and has three cats and I'm just laughing at the idea of keeping them all locked inside, you couldn't even open the patio doors!

i would guess most new york city cats haven’t been outside in years. which kind of makes sense if you live on the 5th floor of a tenement. or i dunno maybe people walk their cats??

cats really love jumping several stories to their glorious deaths! so i suppose in the city I can see some people being overprotective...

If cats aren't allowed outside in NYC, my Brooklyn neighbourhood didn't get the memo. I might write them one saying "Please do not shit in our backyard".

Ooh a back yard, lah di dah

The last place I lived where I had co-responsibility for a good number of indoor and outdoor pets, over half of the outdoor cats (plus a dog that got out of the yard) were hit and killed by traffic. One cat would only very hesitantly step outside before fearfully darting back in like a mole person. But then we also had a cat who would go 'camping' in the woods for days at a time and come bouncing back covered in mud and happy as a lark. In my experience, outdoors only works for some cats.

cats are pretty terrible news for local wildlife, i say lock 'em all up

Our cat, Tuffy, goes out in the yard on a short leash. He talks to the birds, but he poses a much greater threat to the grass, which he consumes voraciously.

When I was living in Paris, I knew plenty of people with "chats d'appartement". The cats though would get obsessed with the outside and I heard of several that jumped to their deaths from balconies. I used to watch one from my vis-a-vis, leaping from one narrow ledge on the fifth floor to another on the fourth.

I’m guessing the “shocked and appalled” part comes from the meat-grinder-like effect of outdoor cats on local wildlife rather than concern for the cats themselves. Let them play in traffic for all I care, just put a bell on them.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

I don't let my cats outside because I don't want them to get hit by a car or pick up feline leukemia. I'm not going to be a dick to people who let their cats out, but I think it's safer for them to be inside.