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Stuff I can't believe people haven't figured out (aiming to be helpful in a useful-going-forward sense, not rude, but I know it's a fine line):Inzombiac posted:straight-laced Len posted:staticy
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Mar 15, 2021 19:11
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 15:21 |
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Might be useful somewhere else, but not here in the "somewhat obscure trivia you just stumbled across" thread That was kinda my feeling (we all have different thresholds for this sort of thing, and in a thread full of fun shared facts and armchair etymologists it seemed more appropriate than it might be elsewhere), but I'm very sorry for the derail and I hope we can find peace as we turn the page to page... 294. I am excited by language, and often my exuberance takes the form of wanting to share what I know for fun or help or whatever. And I know that language evolves and it can be very personal, too; along with that natural selection there is also the fact that parts of a language can't live on their own. So if you like something in it - variety, an underutilized feature, anything - USE it, spread it around, ensure its survival or don't complain when it vanishes. I try to be very positive with it and excite others. For example: I say short-lived with a long "i" (it comes from the noun life, not the verb live, like buck-toothed or light-skinned), and sometimes I get some looks, but I think it's really neat. I try not to get on people's cases if they use a short "i", especially since that is quite widespread, but if I'm in conversation with someone who also seems interested in the topic, I'll bring it up. rydiafan posted:I hate that neither refrigerator not Frigidaire have a D before the G, but fridge does. A high school friend of mine wrote fridge as "frig", like some sort of food jail. He was an oddball, though. (Remember WordPerfect, the word processing program? He put the emphasis on the last syllable, as in the verb. Couldn't be talked out of it.) Since I didn't really contribute any content before: Only in the last few years did I realize why A New Hope is the subtitle/episode name of Star Wars (IV). Obi-Wan Kenobi was the Rebellion's ONLY hope. And now it has a NEW hope in Luke. (Another IV subtitle, though maybe not a correct theory: Star Wars IV: The Voyage Home seems to be titled after the return to Earth after the almost odyssean events of the movie and III before it. But last week, if not before, I noticed that Kirk, seeing the new Enterprise, says "my friends, we've come home." Between the literal destruction of the old Enterprise in III and the three-movie theme that Kirk belongs on a ship instead of in an office, I wonder if that's the home the title means, or at least an additional layer.) Edit: Gaius Marius posted:drat Disney is really loving with the franchise now Harvey TWH has a new favorite as of 13:59 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2021 03:14
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zedprime posted:Are people being obtuse or do I really need to worry about libraries being missing from living memory. Organza Quiz posted:People are talking about the kind of information like "who was that guy in that one movie" or "what are those lyrics" which you can google immediately these days but which you would probably just give up and Not Know back before the internet because going to a library or a CD store or something is a lot more effort than pulling out your phone. Just because it was possible to find out information if you tried hard enough doesn't mean everyone did that always at every opportunity. I'm too young to have done it this way (I'm still old enough to remember times before instant answers at your fingertips), but my understanding is that reference librarians were the people to call for just those questions, and although my main frame of reference is the 1957 Hepburn-Tracy movie Desk Set, I imagine they were pretty happy to help even on the stupidest and most trivial questions, as long as they had the time.
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Apr 20, 2021 02:56
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Grumio posted:Moderna -> ModeRNA -> mRNA MRNA is also their stock symbol, as I just noticed last week in a news clip, and that made me wonder if this was the reason too.
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May 10, 2021 19:22
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Jestery posted:Wait, Sounds like someone just saw the new Technology Connections video on hurricane lamps. (poo poo I Want to Figure Out: how to send info to Alec besides hoping it gets found in a comment...) I only learned this recently myself (a few months ago?), but it suddenly helped Matilda make a lot more sense (Miss Honey's paraffin stove, which as a child I had to guess ran on wax).
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Jun 18, 2021 19:25
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rydiafan posted:Are you gonna recommend barbers? Nah, just information I might be able to pull off a source at my mom's house when I visit later in the summer, but which he could not find online. I think he's pulling the hair off pretty well, even if it is a pragmatic and not a stylistic choice, and I don't normally have short hair anyway so my perspective is not an inside one.
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Jun 18, 2021 22:54
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Sir Lemming posted:Last night somehow the "why do birds suddenly appear" song came to mind, and I recalled a moment in the Simpsons where it was playing over and over and getting lodged into Lisa's subconscious, and I was a little stuck trying to figure out exactly what episode it was, so I was looking it up. It was the one where they bought a new doorbell from "Señor Ding-Dong". I'm not sure which part of this is what you just figured out, the connection between the song and the doorbell or the possible dirty joke. For what it's worth, "Close to You" has been established as Homer and Marge's song since season 2 (and this episode is season 10). I have my doubts about "seen your" in part because of the long E in that phrase; had they pronounced Señor that way, I'd be more convinced. On the other hand, just a few episodes later is one of my favorite hidden dirty jokes in the series. (E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt), AABF19.) This is the episode where Homer accidentally makes Tomacco, and when he's trying his hand at farming, he goes to the store: SNEED'S FEED & SEED Formerly Chuck's
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Sep 18, 2021 17:26
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packetmantis posted:Jeanane Garofalo and Jeanine Pirro are not the same person. For what it's worth, here's my trick to remembering how to spell Janeane Garofalo: alternating vowel patterns (aeae aoao) that pretty much split the names into parts that appear to rhyme (Jane-ane Garo-falo), all single consonants.
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Oct 7, 2021 00:17
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Trabant posted:Pressing F5 while you're in Notepad inserts the current time and date. That one at least is discoverable through the menus. A neat trick, if it's of any use whatsoever, is that putting ".LOG" at the beginning of a text file will make Notepad auto-append the timestamp to the end when you open it up. Still works today (well, I haven't tested Windows 10). And it's a lot better than the old "feature" that would helpfully delete a file outright if you saved while it was empty (up through 98 or so).
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Dec 15, 2021 03:32
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christmas boots posted:Tampons for ducks Don't be silly, everyone knows ducks use quaxi pads.
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Jan 13, 2022 16:34
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FreudianSlippers posted:I thought Dinty Moore was Roger Moore's wacky cousin. Roger Moore was wacky enough though, wasn't he? Funny that this all came up now, too: there was a whole Dinty Moore bit at the start of Family Guy last week ("Lawyer Guy", LACX10). Stewie wonders what the Dinty part is all about. Wikipedia's not too helpful except in listing some people of that name, a Detroit-area sandwich, and the Hormel brand (with no clear connection between them all).
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Mar 18, 2022 00:09
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Richard Lewis did a bunch of commercials in the 90s for the adult juice box Boku (or BoKu; it was styled with macrons over the vowels as a guide to pronunciation), and I think the slogan involved the phrase "have a Boku". That's almost certainly where I came to learn that collection of sounds as a kid/preteen. I doubt I interpreted later-heard uses of "beaucoup" as literal references to the drink, but I probably assumed it was nonsense/slang, possibly with the alternate spelling, for a while. All this coup talk reminds me: I didn't know for a very long time that the S sound at the end of coup de grace should be pronounced. Coup d'etat ends with an -ahh sound, but not that.
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Mar 23, 2022 03:30
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Sir Lemming posted:Live will always go down in history as picking that band name at exactly the wrong time. I must be missing something. Why was June 1991 exactly the wrong time, compared to any other? Is there more than general marquee confusion (tonight: LIVE!)?
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Mar 26, 2022 15:16
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FreudianSlippers posted:
Socially progressive, outspoken, punkish Chumbawamba? Wikipedia posted:Their anarcho-communist political leanings led them to have an irreverent attitude toward authority, and to espouse a variety of political and social causes including animal rights and pacifism (early in their career) and later regarding class struggle, Marxism, feminism, gay liberation, pop culture, and anti-fascism.
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May 9, 2022 15:41
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credburn posted:I remember Mrs. Doubtfire had a scene where a kid said something like, "I saw her peeing; she has nards." I was in a room full of girls and I was awkward and shy and like 10, and got embarrassed or something. My mother and her stupid loving friends would call me "nards" for years after that. The specific term "nards" doesn't seem to be in Mrs. Doubtfire. This is the relevant exchange, after the discovery: -Lydia (threatening Mrs. D with a tennis racket): You're gonna get it. -Chris: ...In the balls! -Lydia: She's got 'em? -Chris: She's got everything. I wonder if "nards" was in a TV edit, though. You couldn't say "balls" on TV in the 90s, right?
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May 21, 2022 16:04
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The Mighty Moltres posted:I'm currently reading the All Creatures Great And Small series by James Herriot. I never knew before how often veterinarians have to get all up inside cows' and horses' buttholes. If you can, try to find the original British formats (the first 6 books were short and compiled into 3 bulkier ones in the US); the American editions lost multiple chapters, mostly in All Things Bright and Beautiful and All Things Wise and Wonderful (2nd and 3rd compilations, drawing from Let Sleeping Vets Lie, Vet in Harness, Vets Might Fly, and Vet in a Spin). Funny that it's the two books with "all things" in their titles that lose significant amounts. ACGAS gets a pass, mostly omitting just one epilogue. After those 6/3, the releases do match.
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Apr 1, 2023 15:58
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The Mighty Moltres posted:This is the collection I was given for my birthday: That looks good, nice attractive box too. (Some old paperbacks had cute cartoony covers, but no matter.) You should expect to find everything in there, no missing passages or stories. Now I feel like getting a matched set like that myself. What year was that one printed?
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Apr 2, 2023 15:31
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:I drive a jay ee ee peeeee! And now if you look up where the term jeep (probably) came from... DrBouvenstein posted:Well, thanks to the latest Technology Connections video, I think I found out why! I was dimly aware some decks did that, but had the same thought yesterday while watching. It's not strictly necessary to show that it's rewinding/fast-forwarding (if the video is moving rapidly too), but I wouldn't be surprised if people put it in because it didn't occur to them how many consumer devices don't do that. It's like the dial tone as soon as someone hangs up on you: I forget the exact details, but apparently it really does (or did) work that way in California or some part of it, so movie and TV editors put in what they knew, not realizing most of the country didn't experience identical hangups. Hmm. Did I learn that from TC too?
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May 10, 2023 22:18
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caspergers posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjS3gzHetA It wasn't that they were bad at ending them, but they had gotten tired of the structure of punch line, blackout, on to the next thing, so that's where the free-flowing transitions came from. To be fair to your claim, this also allowed for sketches that had great beginnings and middles and would not have survived in the rigorous needs-an-ending format. (One could even say that photographically those sketches did without a parting shot.)
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Jun 3, 2023 15:40
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Honk is categorically an outwards sound, and so is shoo. If you can't imagine "honk" describing an inhaling snore sound pretty well, I worry about you. Aphrodite posted:In French, bees don’t buzz. They bourdonner.  they (ils) bourdonnent, n'est-ce pas?
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Mar 15, 2024 01:42
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Surely a group of bees would be "elles"? Oh, bee is grammatically feminine? I was going to joke that you're more likely to hear the male ones buzzing, but now I can't be sure of that from a linguistic or apicultural standpoint.
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Mar 15, 2024 02:00
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Tree Bucket posted:All worker bees are female, aren't they? Same as ants? Oh, I'll bee darned. I knew there was something special with bees but I misremembered it as the queen being the only female, thus the rest being males... or something. Oh well.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:15
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 15:21 |
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Phy posted:One thing I always wanted to know but never really knew who to ask, is if TV stations buy syndicated programs by the episode or by the season. If it's by the episode, and they tend to only buy the ones with higher Nielsen scores, that would go a long way to explaining why it always seems like you catch the same few episodes over and over, without relying on invoking confirmation bias. My understanding, based on a conversation I had with a program director several years ago, is that they are bought by season, for a certain number of airings per episode. Of course, this only applies to series with cash contracts (in back-end syndication, that is, reruns, compared to front-end stuff like Jeopardy!), where stations are free to schedule as they please. Most syndicated reruns I have paid attention to adhere to a nationwide schedule (the barter system with a number of built-in ads as well) and that goes more or less in order or multiple ordered threads. The Simpsons is the only show in the former category that springs to mind, having ended its barter runs in 1999. And it's also full of bizarre scheduling choices these days, especially as the popularity/quality declines and the catalog just gets bigger. WUAB in Cleveland has gone from a few early-evening episodes per weekday (and a rotation through most seasons) to a few episodes in weekend slots (often in the middle of the night) that often get skipped for weeks or months at a time. When it does run the show, it's only from a recent season, more or less in (production) order, but sometimes leapfrogging some. It could barely manage to show anything really old anyhow, mathematically. Acquisition of a new-to-syndication season usually puts that season on very heavy rotation, along with apparent burning off of remaining runs of older episodes. For example, now it's been slowly working through season 33 and 34, after bouncing through 27-32 a bunch. A few weeks ago, it jumped to a few season 26 episodes and back again, as if a few low-rotation episodes just need to get used up, but I have not seen anything older than those in years. It's quite possible that older seasons are retired from availability, at least in this case with such a huge number of episodes. On the other hand, on WTXF in Philadelphia, which currently has a pretty consistent middle-of-the-night weeknight slot, it seems to stay with the most recent season exclusively, but in completely random order (random with replacement!), leading to a lot of deja vu over the course of even a few weeks. For example, a chunk of season 33 last summer was very random, though did cover 21 of 22 episodes in about 6 weeks. This winter/spring, season 34 has been running for over 3 months but 7 of those episodes still haven't run in the time I've been paying attention. But I am still fairly confident the station isn't buying more of some episodes than others. These three months, though missing a few, have still had fairly even distribution of the rest overall. One thing that complicates this is that groups of about 7 episodes are not available in syndication the next fall when the rest of their season are, usually because the original network is still planning a rerun or two (often a combination of holiday episodes that make more sense to reair a year later than in the middle of the year, and episodes from the end of the season that just haven't had a chance to air the typical three-ish times by September). Usually those holds are released by January or so. In the case of Simpsons season 34, it's true that the Halloween episodes seem to be getting passed up in both cities in question, as well as possibly the last few. But season 34 had very few airings on Fox, so it's hard to predict what the held episodes should be with the usual certainty, they should all be available by now, and I don't know what WTXF did in the fall. The station may itself want to feature the holiday episodes more at an appropriate time. Even without adding all the details I have amassed over the years, I know this is very rambly, but I hope it sketches out a rough picture.
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May 2, 2024 04:30
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