Things you’ve only just found out

[TheChosenTwo]

About 2 days ago I discovered that Skegness isn’t in Scotland 😳 How did I never know this before? Embarrassingly, I’m 38 😂

His father was Irish (his mother was Scottish) so he was eligible for Irish citizenship, and if he got himself a passport, could rightly claim to 'be Irish', couldn't he? Kind of?

Born in Leeds I think. So Yorkshireman.
Otherwise lots of yanks could claim to be Irish.

Italians do of course claim large parts of the planet's population to be italian. Same flannel as far as I can see. O toole is Yorkshire Rada.
I may as well say I'm a bloody Viking.

I can claim to be of Scottish extraction, because my dentist is from Dundee.

You're not wrong.

Mandarin: type of citrus fruit ; Historical Chinese civil servant: UK government civil servants informally referred to as Mandarins.

Some of these are desperately sad. The USA is arguably the only superpower in the world, Russia is constantly in the news - to confuse the two on the map is mind-boggling.

Then to not know Africa was a continent with counties. Meaning a complete ignorance of colonial history & independence wars.

Do some people wander around in a confused fog?

And then boast about their ignorance on Mumsnet? Because knowing anything is unbearably nerdy? Better to be an airhead?

Do some people wal

Oops, apologies.

@CharlottenBurger and @ThatFraggle

As a well known Pope once said:
A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again...etc.

And this is often misquoted as 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'

@CharlottenBurger That's interesting about the consonant quota

They have ski resorts. It is somewhere on my bucket list of places to ski (unfortunately sitting a few places below Chile and Japan on my “must-visit” list).

DDs had their initial skiing lessons in Cyprus. I've met many people confused by the fact that not only did Cyprus have a cold winter, it has a ski resort.

Oh I didn’t know that either!

(Adds Cyprus to “must-visit” list)

I don't recommend the skiing in Cyprus by the way... its more of a novelty thing than for serious skiers. We lived a 2hr drive from the Troodos Mountains. However it once took us two hours to get out of the car park at the slopes due to the Cypriot version of parking aka just abandon your car somewhere.

There are these things called mountains. Nice, that hot sunny city on the Med, has a ski resort not far away in the southern Alps, called Isola 2000.

I only learned after the Turkish/Syrian earthquake that its actually cold in places there and how big turkey was. I had only ever thought of it as a sunny beach destination.

I suppose I should've guessed considering mount tiede in tenerife gets deeper snow than Scotland in the winter!

I just learned that Mumsnet supports fixed-width comments. How did you do that?

Ah, backticks like Markdown

try this and

this

But annoyingly, if you start a code block with three backticks

You can't leave it as you'd expect by typing another three backticks

and it goes funky and starts displaying HTML br tags.

Check out something the Irish Govt run called the "Register of Foreign Births". IIRC, you can claim Irish citizenship if born overseas as long as you have EITHER at least one Irish-born grandparent OR a parent who is an Irish national (may be foreign-born), AND hand over a lot of money. If this applies to you, it's a route to an EU passport that doesn't involve moving to an EU member state and naturalising.

It was in Lawrence of Arabia I first heard ululating - a high pitched lu lu lu lu lu sound by women sometimes in grief.

Newcastle in Fife is next to Fife airport.

No please stop, I have an awful phobia of them (and other creepy crawlies)

What is WRONG with some people?

Like nipples? 😂

We've been watching Stanley Tucci's series where he travelled around Italy sampling local regional cuisine and in one place they cooked him this kind of fish thing from a lake that looked exactly like a millipede. We have got used to him gurning at the camera and going 'Oh! My God!', 'I'm in paradise', etc etc at the moment of tasting each dish (we have taken to doing it too for slices of toast or Rich Tea biscuits). Anyhow, this time he just went 'Hmmm' and pulled a stringy bit out of his mouth and said 'Sorry, this is so unattractive'. Another time he had to eat some foie gras and had the grace to just say 'I have now words to say', which we thought was trying to have it both ways.