Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Prince Edward has never been fascinating even for a nanosecond. As for Princess Anne, she is literally the only one of the Queen's children anyone ever has anything good to say about, and always has been.

haven't eaten it, but i had no idea squab was a fucking immature pigeon.

I have eaten squab and pigeon many times and never new that! Thought it was just a different bird.

A hectare (100x100m) is made up of 100 ares (10x10m).

no way

What the hec!

Wait till you hear about the decare

dan i’m not sure about that math

The math is right afaics?

...one hectare contains about 2.47 acres.

wait what is an 'are'

In 1795, when the metric system was introduced, the are was defined as 100 square metres

okay, I learned a new word usage today

Wikipedia can’t be wrong surely?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Hectare_Diagram.svg

I've been reading about advanced LEGO techniques. They might come in handy one day. In particular I've learned about "SNOT", which stands for "Studs Not On Top". It's a technique where the studs are not on top:
https://toweringbrickcreations.com/2022/01/20/isnt-that-stud-supposed-to-be-on-top-no-its-snot-building-sideways-using-lego/

That's not the thing I was shockingly old to learn. I knew that already. I've built LEGO models with studs not on top. No. The thing that I was shockingly old to learn is that wedging a piece into the gap between the studs is, or was, an actual legitimate official old-school LEGO technique:
https://media.brickinstructions.com/00000_thumbs/0611/004.jpg

A legitimate technique from the instruction manuals. When I saw that image a weight lifted from my soul. I thought I was wrong. That I had been wrong. That what I did when I was younger was unnatural and wrong. But I realise now that there is no wrong. Everything is permitted. I was not wrong at all.

There is no centre. No edge. No solid ground. The universe is a mass of motion and nothing is at rest. Nothing.

woah

(i had that Lego car)

Probably determines the width of a flat layer dunnit. Or that is the thickness.
So not so arbitrary but absolutely planned. Intelligent design like.

everything is very simple when measured in 16ths of an inch - a 1x1 brick is 5x5x6, stud is 1 high, diameter 3, walls are 1 thick, plates are 2 thick...

re maths yeah duh. i was thinking 10x100 = 1000. for some reason squaring always confuses my head

i also had that little car

ilx lego-cops assemble (all senses)!

ALCAB ("builders" of course)

I technically still have that little car but it's in a giant bin of legos in my kids room

I thought I was so smart for having figured this lego hack as a kid. It's how I managed to make lego tie fighters way before lego star wars was a thing.

The universe is a mass of motion and nothing is at rest.

I think some of the energy is not motion tho i am p ignorant

A year or two back I learned that the UK holiday company Hoseasons was founded by a person called Hoseason and not just a shortened form of 'holiday season', which is just a lucky coincidence which has no doubt benefited the company over the years.

Similarly, Paddy Power betting shops - a person, rather than 'the luck of the Irish, betting on the gee-gees'.

the diner in Suzanne Vega’s “tom’s diner” is the same diner used for the establishing shots of Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld

I used the "wedging a piece" technique on at least one lego starfighter I designed but it was never clear if it was a sensor array, an energy weapon, or a combination of both.

I also had the little lego police car, but I turned around the bricks with the "POLICE" labels because even as a kid I didn't like cops.

that the reason many songs are titled “23” is because the number refers to Michael Jordan, and therefore can also signify “(being) (a) baller”.

i have to disagree. 23 is always a reference to jim carrey

https://i.imgur.com/MLk8Wn5.png

Not strictly true, 23 appears a lot in the UK free party / techno with a k scene and that comes from Spiral Tribe adopting it from Robert A Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger

Pretty sure Genesis P-Orridge started all that 23 business.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTVgwfpwWzSlPNfJkhQMWl6G3KKE3p3QH6xYKS1BPXWonREawCJeQpMFIOHiVLQawEUljc7Uw&usqp=CAc

who got it from Robert Anton Wilson, who got it from William Burroughs, who ...
it's 23's all the way down!

I forgot Burroughs!

Talent: Burroughs, Genesis steals

the original secret # was 32, but then Burroughs used his cut-up method one wild night, and the mechanizations of chance delivered 23

weird al heads know the real answer is always 27. why? because it's a funny number! not to be confused with "42" references which i think may have faded out a bit since the geek internet of the 90s.

lollll Will

Shuggie Otis, 1971.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbhIZe3smr0

obvious counterpoint to that: the *Ballers* Johnson cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0bdLdTJdKI

Trying and failing to find that scene in Quiz Show where Herbert Stempel brags about knowing everything about any two-digit number and waiter says “I dunno… 23?” and then Stempel starts rattling off a dozen random facts about the number 23.

xp
Mostly trying to show an early reference, it pre-dates Michael Jordan (as does the BJ version).

23 is also on the album art of "yellow submarine"!

xp
Mostly trying to show an early reference, it pre-dates Michael Jordan (as does the BJ version).

That Serial podcast is supported by WBEZ of Chicaco, not WB-Easy of Chicago.

Unless I've missed something, Alban Berg predates the ones mentioned on this thread in 23-obsession:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/945968

I put some Northampton based friends who were into Temple of Psychic Youth etc up a couple of times when I was living in London. They were most thrilled to see I lived at number 23 which would be mid to late 80s.
Said it was a number that kept turning up in coincidences and things

Oh God really? I have someone in my family who is 'into' conspiracies and I happened to tell him that the optimum time to get quotes for renewing car insurance is 23 days before your renewal date. Anyway he kept going on about 'noticing the number 23 a lot lately' so I guess he's just read that on some wacky site rather than actually noticing it himself, which is vmic. Not sure he actually got around to comparing car insurance either.

it's a long (and tiresome) theme in the illuminatus! books, tho not (i'm guessing) invented by them

(they also made a fuss abt 19)

i'm also guessing not invented by burroughs actually, tho he's almost certainly the common denominator for all the 70s vectors -- the throbbing gristle mail art expanded universe -- so i wonder if it's a theme waiting to be amplified in other earlier esoteric writing and general dicking about (crowley wrote a poem called "23 skidoo": it forms chapter 23 of his book of lies)

like the blavatsky milieu? vienna round the time the 12-toners were getting into gear was stiff with theosophists -- the mahlers, hugo wolf, the bruckner milieu -- so if 23 mattered to them this stuff was in the air generally really

last paragraph maybe being an organic way of linking alban berg to psychick TV

Would like to see some robust data-led research into the significance of the number 23