I didn’t know a cheesecake had cheese in it!

[CormoranStrike]

Okay, not these days, cos I’m a sophisticated and cultured woman now, but I can clearly remember being utterly astonished as a teenager to find out a cheesecake had cheese in it.

In my defence, the only cheese in my house till then had been blocks of cheddar, or cheese slices. I had no idea that cheese could be anything other than orange!

What were your WTF discoveries, which seem even more bizarre through the lens of time?

I thought narwhals were a fake fantasy animal until that chap challenged a terrorist with a narwhal tusk and it was all over the news and I looked it up

London born and bred and never heard of a London cheesecake as described here. My (Jewish) Gran used to call a London cheesecake one that had a sour cream topping. Rather than a can of cherry pie filling.

When i was little I thought there were 2 types of books - those with facts and those that were fiction. And all fiction ended happily.

My faith in books with facts was destroyed by one of my brothers. He showed me the old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica (all facts obviously) and then showed me the entry for Walt Disney. The entry referred to him as a living person but Walt had died a few years earlier. I was devastated and could never again fully trust things claiming to be the truth.

All novels, particularly those meant to be good literature, OBVIOUSLY had happy endings. I honestly don't know how I made it to my early 20s and ended up studying English Lit at uni and was so astounded by the ending of House of Mirth. It sounds happy doesn't it? And the main character was such upbeat, optimistic....until things start to go wrong. And then in the end she ends up in poverty and dying. It just was so very very wrong. Given that by then I'd probably read thousands of books, most of Shakespeare, all the Brontes etc how could this come as such a great surprise!?!

One of my brothers also told me that Niagara Falls was turned off at night as it would otherwise be a waste of water when there were no tourists about to see it.

fyi - this is untrue but the flow is reduced a bit as the water is diverted to a nearby hydroelectric plant.

@Cocolapew

My mum used to make wee buns called cheesecakes, pastry bottom, jam in the middle and a sponge top. Not a bit of cheese in sight.

These were the cheesecakes I grew up with in Norfolk. I still make them sometimes, but prefer New York style cheesecake.

@DuzzyFuck I thought it was made up, just like Pooh Bear 😋

I was an adult when I discovered that Llamas don't have two heads . I can never feel the same about Dr Doolittle

I thought gammon was a fish until I was about 20. Probably because it rhymes with “salmon”.

Until last year I had also never heard the word “furlough” before. I had to my ogle what it meant so I didn’t embarrass myself in conversations. I’m 35 😬

*google

Learning in 2011 that 90 per cent of computer users don't know about the FIND keyboard shortcut - "Control+F" aka Ctrl+F (or Edit / Find or command+F on a Mac) to bring up a mini search bar to find a word or phrase in whatever you're reading (web page, PDF, Word doc).

You can also use "/" when reading a web page to bring up this Quick Find option (but Ctrl+F gives more options, eg matching Upper or lower case).

I am quite techy so would be expected to know this but what I hadn't realised is that it's not well known - I'd just assume that everyone else had picked it up along the way, as I had - from spotting the keyboard shortcut info in the Edit menu.

It's so useful (I use it multiple times a day) and speeds things up massively, so I' assume it was more widely known. But it isn't.

It really shifted my perspective on how other people interact with and use computers, and also about what they infer from menu options - it genuinely did feel a bit 'mind blowing' at the time, and I tweeted that "I think I now understand what it's like to be a Jehovah's Witness. I want to knock on strangers' doors & tell them the good news of Ctrl+F" haha :)

It's not just that people didn't know about Ctrl+F but they also didn't know about clicking on Edit then Find to jump to a word in a document - instead they'd manually scroll through long documents to find the word they were interested in .

Jo

Further reading
Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (18 Aug 2011) - the original article that surprised a lot of people.

Why using Control+F may be the most important computing skill (22 Aug 2011)
"The response to our story about how few people know how to find words in documents has touched a nerve. There have been basically three reactions: 1) Whoa! That's crazy! 2) No one knows keyboard shortcuts and it's silly of you to expect that they do. 3) Wow, I did not know about this shortcut and it is awesome. All of which make sense in their own way."

Anyway it turns out that it's a really useful skill that saves time and also teaches people to look for context in information.

Ctrl-F: Helping make networks more resilient against misinformation can be as simple as two fingers (29 Jan 2020)
Sometimes it’s the sort of basic Internet skill you might take for granted — like knowing how to search a web page — that can stop someone from sharing fake news.

@JoBrodie

Learning in 2011 that 90 per cent of computer users don't know about the FIND keyboard shortcut - "Control+F" aka Ctrl+F (or Edit / Find or command+F on a Mac) to bring up a mini search bar to find a word or phrase in whatever you're reading (web page, PDF, Word doc).

You can also use "/" when reading a web page to bring up this Quick Find option (but Ctrl+F gives more options, eg matching Upper or lower case).

I am quite techy so would be expected to know this but what I hadn't realised is that it's not well known - I'd just assume that everyone else had picked it up along the way, as I had - from spotting the keyboard shortcut info in the Edit menu.

It's so useful (I use it multiple times a day) and speeds things up massively, so I' assume it was more widely known. But it isn't.

It really shifted my perspective on how other people interact with and use computers, and also about what they infer from menu options - it genuinely did feel a bit 'mind blowing' at the time, and I tweeted that "I think I now understand what it's like to be a Jehovah's Witness. I want to knock on strangers' doors & tell them the good news of Ctrl+F" haha :)

It's not just that people didn't know about Ctrl+F but they also didn't know about clicking on Edit then Find to jump to a word in a document - instead they'd manually scroll through long documents to find the word they were interested in .

Jo

Further reading
Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (18 Aug 2011) - the original article that surprised a lot of people.

Why using Control+F may be the most important computing skill (22 Aug 2011)
"The response to our story about how few people know how to find words in documents has touched a nerve. There have been basically three reactions: 1) Whoa! That's crazy! 2) No one knows keyboard shortcuts and it's silly of you to expect that they do. 3) Wow, I did not know about this shortcut and it is awesome. All of which make sense in their own way."

Anyway it turns out that it's a really useful skill that saves time and also teaches people to look for context in information.

Ctrl-F: Helping make networks more resilient against misinformation can be as simple as two fingers (29 Jan 2020)
Sometimes it’s the sort of basic Internet skill you might take for granted — like knowing how to search a web page — that can stop someone from sharing fake news.

Older people ‘less techy’ people who used the DOS version of Word know all the shortcuts. The ones who don’t tend to be the ones who use a mouse or Apple products

@ReggieKrait I had to look furlough up too. I'd never heard it before last year.

Yes, I find it's the youngsters who never use shortcuts and use the numbers at the top of the keyboard instead of the num pad.
(I have colleagues in their early twenties who seem to think the fact they used computers at primary school, makes them better at it than those of us who have been using them at work and university for the last 30 years!)

I’d only heard the word furlough in relation to OITNB so still looked it up in the context of work. It wasn’t commonly used here before last year.

Yes I'm 50 and learned to type on a (non-electric) typewriter so keyboard shortcuts are natural to me at my age. But even youthful mouse users might be using the clickable menu options - so it still feels quite surprising that they don't seem to have come across Edit / Find, even if they don't use it via a keyboard shortcut.

On an iPhone the way to access the Ctrl+F equivalent is to pull down at the top to bring up the address or search bar and type in the word. The drop-down menu will say how often the word appears on the page and you can jump to each instance of it.

Jo

@AnnLouiseB

I wonder if you’re my childhood friend OP - I vividly remember the conversation where she said ‘isn’t it funny that cheesecake is called cheesecake when it’s not made with cheese’. After we had cleared that one up she said ‘don’t tell me carrot cake is made with carrots?!’ 🤣

I hope you pointed out that the carrot cake icing is made with soft cheese...

I put some philly on a slice of toast and a spoonful of blackcurrant jam on top. Daughter 'what are you doing? How revolting. Ugh.' Me 'but you eat cheesecake. It's more or less the same.' Who's right? I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to eat, she thinks I'm an unnatural creature.

And, not food related, watching a Netflix thing today, I found out that Skid Row - which I've always assumed was a generic term for being broke, homeless, generally fairly down and out, 'he's on skid row', - is an actual, physical place in Los Angeles where the City authorities allow the homeless and dispossessed to gather and live on the streets pretty much undisturbed and disregarded inside its boundaries. It's immensely depressing.

@GoryGilmore I was the same with Mince pies 😆

@longwayoff Was it that thing about Hotel Cecil? I can't imagine what I'd have done if I'd booked with Thompsons and end up there like that poor young couple from Plymouth!!

See, I'm the otherwise round. I couldn't bear the thought of eating cheesecake until my mid 20's knowing it had cheese in it. I couldn't get past the thought it would taste like cheddar.

I always used to think that "techy" people were a bit patronising, now, I know that they are.

@Weedsnseeds1

ImAncient true. Some tagines also have honey, so even more medieval.

Blancmange was originally made with chicken. As a dessert!

You can still get it in Turkey - it's called Tavuk göğsü. I never tried it when I was living there, but friends who did generally found it a bit weird.

I remember the Channel Tunnel being dug. There were frequently pictures of the mighty tunnel boring machines that were being used and they were definitely going through the rock under the seabed.

It was such a massive project at the time. The rail link to the continent that runs through it was HS1. We are now on HS2, which will leave London heading in the opposite direction and is equally controversial and eye-wateringly expensive in it's own way.

It was well into the 2000s when I discovered that the Bee Gees were men! I've no clue how I'd heard their music most of my life without really registering the lyrics or seeing any sort of photo or video. Or maybe I just didn't correlate the images, or maybe my brain just refused to accept the high pitch was men? I don't know, but I still think it's so funny that I can't even be ashamed of it!