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’m pretty sure the packet mix of Greens (I think) cheesecake and the £1 Iceland toffee cheesecake have no cheese in.

@Topseyt

Actually, the Channel Tunnel is three tunnels. All in the rock beneath the seabed.

One tunnel for trains heading over to France from the UK, one for trains coming the other way, and a service tunnel for when engineering or assistance may be needed.

Say what?!

@eaglejulesk

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.

Yes, they were delicious, but I could never understand why they were called cheesecakes when they weren't.

Dm makes these. But she refers to them as macaroons. They are bloody delicious.

After spending my university Saturdays working in a bookies, I know ‘furlough’ as the measurement for the length of a horse race!

That's a furlong, an 1/8th of a mile.

That the IRA used to warm the police that they’d planted a bomb. My first experience of terrorism was 9/11, which shaped my world view. Why terrorists would warn people was an alien concept to me until my mid 20s, when discussing it with my mum, who lived in London in the 1970s and therefore had some experience of IRA bomb scares.

Laser car washes use the lasers to measure the distance between the water jets and the car. They don’t zap away the dirt with lasers. Most disappointing.

I got confused in a meeting once with clients who’d traveled in from Gothenburg. I asked them whether they’d come in on the bat plane. And asked where they’d really flown in from.

Turns out that Gothenburg is a real place. And Gotham city is where Batman lives.

I also didn’t know narwhals existed until
I watched an Attenborough documentary (blue planet maybe) where they were shown. If David Attenborough says they exist I believe him. If he said cows lived on the moon and ate pizza I’d believe it.

There was a bbc doc a while ago which showed penguins living in a forest (on an island in the southern ocean I think). I’m still not sure I believe it. Because it wasn’t an Attenborough one.

Now that people have for their heads around cheesecake containing cheese and carrot cake containing carrots, would this be a good time to bring up Red Velvet cake?

• have got their heads around

I thought tuna were small fish like sardines or even trout/salmon - not the huge shark like fish they are.

I thought it was the Artic not the Arctic until my 20s.

I thought all movies were filmed in sequence until I saw the making of a beautiful mind where they said they filmed that in sequence which was different from how all other films are made!

I once tried to cook raw pasta in the microwave (didn't realise it
needed to be boiled in water).

@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.

I know ctrl+f for find and use it often.

I use Notepad++ lots and love ctrl+g for ‘go’ so it will take you to a particular line. I also love that rather than ‘cancel’ the button says ‘I’m going nowhere’

@torquewench

Now that people have for their heads around cheesecake containing cheese and carrot cake containing carrots, would this be a good time to bring up Red Velvet cake?

Dont the original recipes contain beetroot. Funnily enough made a chocolate beetroot cake last weekend. It was very rich , but wasnt red as it had cocoa and grated dark chocolate

@Vicliz24

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

I wasn't an adult but I remembered being ridiculed by the teacher at junior school and bringing in my Colchester zoo guide book as evidence. Turned out that the llama in the photo just had another llama standing behind it facing the other way 😳

@Ifailed
That's a furlong, an 1/8th of a mile

So it is!! No wonder I was confused 🤣

@Gubanc

I'm jot even sure why it's called cheese...cream cheese is more of a curd.

Which, dried out, seasoned and matured, becomes hard cheese.

⁰Checkout worker at supermarket "oh you've got pitta bread. I can never get it right' Me'? How do u cook it?' She 'In the microwave'.

Until this thread I had no idea there was a connection between being Jewish and knowing all about cheesecake. Is this like the NI Protestants and their traybakes? (another thing I learnt about on MN)

@Willowwarble that is priceless. I hope you got a gold star for observation.

The older dandelion discoverers - you must have had much tidier gardens than we did.
That was my gardening job for my mum as a kid, to go and take the flower heads off or dig them out with a trowel.

I'm old enough to remember the Chunnel being built, and to know ctrl F.
But I refused to eat cheese cake as a kid- because of the cheese and carrot cake because of the carrot. TBF I'm not that keen on cheesecake as an adult, but carrot cake is lush.

Both me and Dbro thought Brussel sprouts grew like cabbages until our 20s... We thought dad had stuck them on a huge stem as a joke one Christmas .

@JaneExotic

After spending my university Saturdays working in a bookies, I know ‘furlough’ as the measurement for the length of a horse race! 1 furlough = 1/8 of a mile When we got to COVID, I had absolutely no clue why the government wanted workers to furlough!

It’s a furlong.

Oops X posted.

In defence of the posters imagining the channel tunnel going through the water, there is a widely used technique where tunnels (or “tubes”) do in fact sit ~in the water, on the sea bed. Do an online search for “immersed tube” or “immersed tunnel” and you will find lots of examples and explanations on how they are constructed. The tunnels/tubes are constructed on land, in sections, then transported and lowered into place on the sea bed. The Fehmarn link currently under construction between Germany and Denmark is this kind of immersed tunnel. The Bayside tube in San Fransisco is another example (one that I have heard of). Look up “submerged floating tunnel” as well - though these are more futuristic.

The channel tunnel is of course the other kind of tunnel that is bored through the rock beneath the sea (and like other pps I imagine there are younger people who don’t remember the TV pictures that showed this quite clearly). But it’s totally plausible to imagine that it is sitting on the sea bed.

@terrywynne
The Jewish and cheesecake connection is that during the Jewish festival of Shavuot there is a custom to eat milky foods including cheesecakes. This is to remember the fact that before receiving the tablets the Jewish people became essentially vegetarians for 3 days.

*Transbay tube in San Fransisco

I overheard a conversation in the work kitchen a few years back, the gist of which was that someone was patiently explaining to a 20 yo vacation scheme bod (or called work experience in old money) that ponies were not in fact baby horses and that cow's milk only came from female cows.