Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Patrick Dennis was not merely a pseudonym, it was one of several pseudonyms used by a decidedly mercurial gay man who used to be Ray Kroc's butler

The robotic spider that crawls over Julien Temple's face in the Vienna video is the same one from You Only Live Twice

bullshit

Korean Age

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/20/everyone-in-south-korea-could-soon-be-getting-younger

...see also racehorses

something from about 6 months ago which i was reminded of watching TV earlier: pole dancing poles rotate

I guess Korean babies are shockingly old at birth

There was a thing not long ago about Koreans' drinking age. Every 20-year-old becomes of age at midnight on December 31, but a COVID curfew meant they had to wait.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/31/korean-new-year-covid-pandemic/

After misreading a timeline in my 4th or 5th grade history textbook as "King John sings the Magna Carta" (dyslexics untie!), it was quite a few years before I found out the Magna Carta was a document and not an opera or something.

Lol, good one.

Speaking of which, this exists: http://magnacartatrails.com/events/the-great-charter-magna-carta-community-opera/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ4mxOluXY4

I remember reading that in the Russian Revolution era some of the poor agrarian classes didn't know that The Internationale was some popular verse that people sung as a political anthem and thought it might be some kind of supernatural creature.

That Bridgerton is an adaptation of a series of novels written about 20 years ago, and not, as I assumed, something invented by Netflix to cash in on the success of Downtown Abbey.

I saw one of the books a few days ago but assumed it was a tv tie in and didn't look further.

I guess i’m astonishing old to learn bridgerton is a thing of any kind

John Peel's first wife was only 15 when they married (in Texas, where that was legal at the time). She later committed suicide.

Coincidentally and apropos of nothing I learned tonight that Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys's first wife was 15, and that after they divorced she married the 54-year-old Groucho Marx when she was 21.

Teenage Kicks

That people still really care about the Cure

"Downtown Abbey" sounds like an "In Living Color" parody.

Do that which you would like to do
in Downton Abbey

I nearly corrected myself with a Billy Joel themed joke but decided it wasn’t really working.

I'm a woman.

It's esoteric, but I recently bought one of those old rackmount Akai samplers from the 1990s - a big beige box with a jogwheel on the front and 32mb of memory. While looking at old sample libraries I realised that 90% of the non-licensed soundtrack for the first WipeOut game came from a single sample CD, Zero-g Datafile One. In this video the uploader has even used the samples to make a WipeOut-style tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msqrVjc-bZQ

And! The backing vocals from Haddaway's "What is Love" come from the same sample CD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJSHAsmeZBY

The producer didn't even hire a backing vocalist. But of course it would have been nothing without Haddaway's anguished vocal performance. It haunts me still. As a kid I assumed the musicians made those sounds themselves, or scoured their record collections, but they just bought Zero-G Datafile One and Two instead. They still had to go through those discs and find the best samples and use them musically, but it was a lot easier than I expected.

If you listen to the second volume it's like a snapshop of 1990s video game music, particularly Jet Set Radio and Sonic CD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_68RD0tkQM

It makes sense given that the musicians had a tight deadline to make hours of video game music with a budget of nothing. It's just striking that they all seemed to have the exact same sample CD.

same thing happens when you fire up any classic digital synth and go through the presets, you'll be saying "hey wait a minute, that's ..." a lot. I imagine the same is true with whatever the hot new VST is these days.

just remembered when I first got Ableton in the early 2000s and all the presets on the synths were the same as those used on the Morr records I was into at the time.

Mr. Hooper was a communist.

Women were not allowed to run in the Boston marathon until 1972, and for that matter, before the 1980s, there were no women's distance races in the Olympics at all. The women's marathon was introduced at the 1984 Summer Olympics

Here is Katherine Switzer (trying to) complete her 1967 run while being assaulted by race manager Jock Semple:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/04/19/sports/18switzer-web/18switzer-web-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

"The AAU banned women from competing in races against men as a result of her run, and it was not until 1972 that the Boston Marathon established an official women's race."

I mean, until 1974, women were often denied the ability to open their own bank accounts.

I remember comment from the time from people about it being a year of women or something to that effect. Me being like 7 years old.

Wonder how things like taht change in the world of For All Mankind since I've just been watching that era in it.

Iirc in For All Mankind the Equal Rights Amendment is ratified almost immediately, under Nixon.

xpost That I knew already. I guess back then running was considered kind of weird for everyone, period, but in the case of women, people literally believed it was dangerous to run fast for more than two miles at a time! Based on ... I dunno, bullshit? Like, this is so nuts:

When Joan Ullyot, a physician and an accomplished runner, published her book Women's Running in 1976, she took on a daunting set of traditional ideas that boiled down to one admonition: women should not run long distances.

They were not physiologically built for it, women were told. Compared with men, they typically had higher body fat, less muscle bulk and lighter bone structure, factors that should discourage them from engaging in long-distance running – or so it was believed. Moreover, many authorities in the field warned that extended running might harm women’s reproductive organs.

That's downright medieval in its intellectual and scientific dishonesty.

that "cf" is short for the Latin CONFER, which means "compare"

i'm not even going to type what i thought it meant but i feel really dumb

covfefe

In my head "cf" stands for "see, for example"

"SEE For instance" is what i mentally translated it to for a while

cf describes about 28% of all ilx threads.

i used to kind of assume, without putting it to the test, that if you did a poo in the shower it would just sort of disintegrate under the spray & go down the plughole. this is not the case.

STORY TIME

there was a post about this important matter on ilx once. They key is to use your feet like you are treading grapes, apparently.

More like the coming of prince kajapoopoo!

Poo shy shy
Flush flush

Martin Sheen's real name is Ramon Estévez

That's what's on his drivers license to this day, his birth certificate, etc.

Wait'll you see Charlie Sheen's real name

Frasier H. Babalucci

what, didn’t have questions when you saw the name of his son, emiliiiiiliiiiiioooo

maybe he thought Emilio was his stage name and his real name was, like, Kyle Sheen

that "cf" is short for the Latin CONFER, which means "compare"
i'm not even going to type what i thought it meant but i feel really dumb

Today I learned that a “beamer” only refers to a BMW motorcycle. The correct slang term for a BMW car is “bimmer” (which I have never heard before).

Just reading up on that Kathrine Switzer/Jock Semple incident. This was news to me. Good for her for not letting him stop her. She seems like a hero. Apparently, she and Semple became friends in later years.