Things you didn't know you didn't know

Today I learned that Johnny Mathis is:

1) Black*
2) Gay
3) Still alive

*Never gave it much thought, but I kinda thought he was Latino

 

For a while I was pretty sure that almost every country other than the United States kind of rolled their eyes at us.

I discovered I was wrong when I heard my cousin (she was living in Germany at the time) answer the question "What does the rest of the world think of us?"

She simply said, "they don't".

 

Sorry, but who's "us" in your case?

 

The entire United States.

 

Apparently, you can send your heartbeat via an Apple watch (this will be your bona fide heartbeat rhythm) or Apple phone (which will be a standardized rhythm, unless you have an Apple watch or other heartbeat monitor, in which case it will pull the data from that)!

 

Or you could just listen to Dark Side of the Moon. That opens and ends with a nice heartbeat

 

And apparently, a new law in Arizona: Minimum marriage age will be 15!? Children 16-17 will need parental consent in most cases!

 

But is that an improvement or not? Some US states didn't have any minimum age until recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_marriage_in_the_United_States

 

It is in the sense that they finally have something in law about minimum age for marriage.

 

A friend of my family went through her whole pregnancy without realising she was pregnant. She went into hospital with abdominal pains, went to the bathroom, and came out with a baby girl.

 

I thought I knew the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, only to be thrown off of a cliff when I answered incorrectly. It's actually 15 beats per second at an amplitude of 22 cm.

 

While I was in research I was watching a presentation from a young grad student and he was talking about oil as a fossil fuel. He had jokingly put up a picture of Barney, as in indicating that many of the oil reserves came from dead dinosaurs. Our prof completely roasted him, stating 'come on ___ really?' Oil comes from dead plant matter and bacteria. He knew that of course, as he had an x through the Barney on screen, but I wondered how many people don't know this. I had thought it came from things like diatoms, and plant matter. Yet, I didn't know about the bacteria.

 

True that the majority of the oil is from plants and bacteria, as that's most of Earth's biomass, but it's not like the members of the animal kingdom were segregating their carbon into alternative sinks when they died, so... part of the oil is dead dinosaurs.

 

Which led to a very interesting "What If? XKCD" where somebody asked how much dinosaur is in the oil that goes into plastic dinosaurs

 

Graveyards would take a little longer because burial procedures – embalming the body, putting a barrier between the body and the ground – are specifically designed to keep the natural processes from happening, but some people are already trying to extract the methane gas that escapes from landfills right now

 

The sheer variety of people in the trans community.

I decided on a whim that one of the MCs in my (failed) NaNo project should be trans, because, why not? Thank all that's green and holy that I decided to throw a couple of search terms into Google before I got too far in. I fell down a rabbit hole that included thing like gender dysphoria (where I started), genderfluid, intersex, chromosome abnormalities, different kinds of estrogen and testosterone therapies, the effects of such therapies, different surgeries, different psychologies... I lost two day's worth of writing time just trying to answer the question "Wait, so which sort of trans person am I even writing about here?"

 

I know that feeling well. "Lets make a charactera bit different" and all the sudden you find yourself parachuting into the front lines of a scientific and cultural war. Educational, but extremely frustrating.

 

I've made it my mission to understand everyone in the LGBTQIA community, but there are just so many sub-categories that I've resigned myself to the fact that it'll be a while. When I meet someone, I just use the pronouns I think are most appropriate* and if I get it wrong, I'll apologise and correct myself.

*Yes, I assume their gender!

 

@BayView wrote: What are some things you thought you knew enough about to write compellingly and then found out you had wrong/incomplete?

*************

Some people think they can write about Lawyers or Doctors and don't have the faintest idea what they are talking about.

 

@WaffleWhale I don't think you realized, like I didn't for a while, that most of this forum's members are from the U.K. Freaked me out when everybody kept spelling favorite, favorouite, or something like that or color, colour.

They probably spell "realized" realised.

 

I've never once been to England, but I still have to consciously remove the "u" from color and honor, among others. The just... feel right as colour and honour.