what stunningly obvious pieces of knowledge escaped you for years and years?

[thewomanwhothoughtshewasahat]

I managed 25 years of life without knowing who Pele was. I managed 36 years without knowing a dodge was a kind of american car. dh managed 25 years without realising that the name The Beatles was a play on the word beat. how do educated well-read people manage stuff like this? and don't you love it when you learn something like that?

Oh, hc, one of my uni friends was at a bar once and some bloke was chatting with her. He was reasonably interesting, tall, a photographer from South America. She couldn't work out why he was talking to her, until she worked it out: "Oh! You want to sleep with me!", she said.

She was happy to sleep with him, but it took her ages to work out that was what he wanted.

see, they should teach that in school, istead of all that algebra crapola

Also when I was Little I thought Jimmy Saville's name was Jim'll

Hmm, no, I think that just proves you're both mad.

Same girl, same bloke. She was living in residence and had no phone. So he would call her up, and say, via the man on the desk talking via my friends intercom, "hey, I'll be in X bar tonight from 10, come join me". And she would say "Will you leave at 3? I will come meet you at home, ok?".

Poor man on the desk.

When we used to go to Florida we got the old "i love your accent, it's so quaint". My granddad used to almost burst a blood vessel!

Glad I'm not the only one who was cauught about misled/mizzled! {grin]

I used to think that Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool were all very close to each other (mid/late teens for that one).

I was then shocked to discover in my 20s, when I moved down to England, that the Watford Gap was not that far North of London . I had always assumed that because the epxression "North of the Watford Gap" implied some sort of remote desolate wasteland that at least it was in ther North of England somewhere. But it is not even as far as Birmingham!

there is a dunkirk in nottingham and during ahistory lesson my friend put her hand up and said how could they land on the beaches at dunkirk the river trent goes through clifton
she didnt realise the teacher was on about france

Prettybird - North of the Watford Gap DOES imply a remote desolate wasteland. Though personally I prefer north of Hampstead to mean the same thing

suejonez!

back to original question....

i didnt realise until aged about 19 that rice was not a form of pasta

in the same way spaghetti is long / penne is long tubes / macaroni is like penne sort of, etc etc

i though rice was just short bits

...it was a while before it dawned on me that couscous wasn't the seeds of the couscous plant...

Also when I was Little I thought Jimmy Saville's name was Jim'll

by shcneebly

I never knew an owl had no arse.
Just thought owl pellets were the bits that hadn't passed through it...

Hmm, I'm sure owls have arses, but like most birds, it'll be a cloaca at the end, which passes mixed feces and urine. I did start to look this up the other day, but got distracted.

The thing is, they can't pass the bones and fur and so on, so they vomit that up. But I'm sure there must be a bit of fecal matter that goes through.

I find quite a few owl pellets on my garden wall.
It is fascinating to soak them in water (Am loling at the thought that a discussion on whether or not owls have arses is what constitutes my precious free time today.)

Spot on NQC - I DID look it up

Oh, thanks SaintGeorge, I was pretty sure before I started looking.

Now, face mites actually have no anus. They fill up with poo and die.

Are they the ones on your eyelashes?

Well, not just your lashes obviously.

I think they mostly live in the eybrows. But they wander around the face, eating bits of dead skin.

I can't work out which would be more disturbing, having a face covered in face mite poo, or a face covered in dead face mites full of poo.

eyebrows.

pmsl NQC. When I was little I thought that is what happened to humans, we eventually died because we filled up with poo!
I thought our bodies were hollow and filled from the feet up!

Maybe I was a face mite in a previous life

I have just found out that Ron Howard (dir of Davinci Code / Richie Cunningham from Happy Days) is the brother of Clint Howard who played the little kid in Gentle Ben and often plays ugly rednecks in comedies. Not immediately obvious but as a self-styled movie/tv trivia geek I am gobsmacked.

I also discovered recently that the cotoneaster plant is pronounced catoniasta - thought they were 2 different plants.