What have you learned today?

XsjadoBlayde

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Apr 29, 2020
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Bugger, can't edit this one in last post, but today sir/madam/professor, I was also educated in "avocado hand"


🙃Millenials🙃
 
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gorfias

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I learned the name of this song as well as who wrote it. Quietly terrific, I'd never thought to even ask.

 

Chimpzy

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There's companies that specialize in breeding and selling queen honey bees. They can cost upwards of $30.
 
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The Rogue Wolf

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Today I learned that the famous Dunning-Kruger study was inspired by an idiot who thought that smearing lemon juice on his face would make it invisible to security cameras (since lemon juice creates "invisible ink"), so he proceeded to rob two banks without a mask.

 
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Elvis Starburst

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Today I learned that cars are a pain to shop for.

30/06/2020 edit: Today I learned relationships suck
 
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Bob_McMillan

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Today (okay, technically last night) I learned that the crazy international demand for avocados has lead to the forming of cartels in Mexico and causing water shortages in Chile.
 
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Kae

That which exists in the absence of space.
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Lose 1d20 sanity points.
Today (okay, technically last night) I learned that the crazy international demand for avocados has lead to the forming of cartels in Mexico and causing water shortages in Chile.
Yeah, the avocados require way too much water, so plantations in general aren't great for the environment and particularly disruptive in areas where they wouldn't normally grow.

So yeah, they maybe tasty and good for your health but they're pretty bad for everyone else.
 

SckizoBoy

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Yeah, the avocados require way too much water
Which is sort of ironic, given how oil-y avocados are, or not if you're a botanist.

But still, at about 90 gallons of water required to grow one of them to maturity in Chile, it's no wonder they're supply situation is screwed. :(

OT: Interactive whiteboards are a thing, shows my age, I come from the age of chalk and blackboards.
 

Wintermute

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Apr 25, 2020
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I just learned his dog is 300 years old
I just learned the news lied to me. The story I read said a new study discovered 1 dog year = 30 human years, now it's been edited and it says a puppy is about 30 years old or something. :(

This is very disappointing. The idea of a 300 year old dog seemed pretty cool.
 
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Hawki

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Today I learned that people can make threads about what they learned today.

It was a groundbreaking revelation.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Apr 29, 2020
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I have learnt in the last 24 hours that it really is possible to eat too much home-cooked lassgne. Then forget about it as soon as spicy mexicana cheese is added. Then promptly remember it twice as hard.
 
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Asita

Answer Hazy, Ask Again Later
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Ever see Casablanca? I actually had not until very recently, and with it I learned something interesting about it.

There's a scene where the Nazis start singing Die Wacht am Rhine, a patriotic German song with its roots in the Franco-Prussian War, which at the time was more or less the de facto German national anthem. This leads one of the main characters to get the band to start playing La Marseillaise, which everyone else in the bar joins in, ultimately drowning out the Nazis. It's a surprisingly emotional scene, and several of the characters are seen brimming with tears. ...That wasn't entirely staged.

For those unfamiliar, Casablanca was released in 1942, and many of the actors were in fact refugees who had fled from the Nazis.

Marcel Dalio (Emil) and Madeleine Lebeau had fled Paris together shortly before the Nazis took it in 1940. Most of Dalio's family would die in concentration camps. S.Z. Sakall (Carl) fled Germany in 1939. His sisters and niece shared the same fate as Dalio's family. Peter Lorre fled to Paris and then London from Nazi Germany in 1933, before eventually making it to America. Paul Henreid (Lazlo) was an Austrian-English actor who had been so vocally anti-Nazi as to be declared an "official enemy of the Third Reich" and had relocated to the States in 1941. Curt Bois (pickpocket)? Jewish-German refugee. Leonard Kinskey (Sascha)? Helmut Dantine? Imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp in 1938, but ultimately released and sent by his family to California. Louis V. Arco, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, and Wolfgang Zilzer? The film is chock full of people who had fled Nazi oppression. Even actors cast as the Nazis in the film (such as Conrad Veidt, who played antagonist Major Strasser).

Granted, I am very late to the party in this (though again, I only just got around to seeing Casablanca, so that is perhaps to be expected). Aljean Harmetz wrote about this some time ago in the Making of Casablanca, and she sums it up pretty well.

Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bergman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden’s migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarians SZ Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.

“If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the color and tone it had,” says Pauline Kael. Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. “I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees,” says Seymour.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

~it ends here~
Apr 29, 2020
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Today I learnt what it is called when hearing people chew loudly causes intense illogical anger. It is somewhat relieving to learn, as there was a long term relationship with a beautiful kind and caring lady who may be one of the best examples of humanity I know, yet when I heard her chew, this horrible anger cropped up inside until the sound went away, though I never said anything about it cause it was obviously an illogical reaction and am very experienced in hiding negative emotions in front of others due to dodgy childhood, i always felt guilty and confused every time. At least now the "confused" part has been dealt with. That's all I needed really.
 
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