15
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What is a fun or interesting fact about where you live?
Partly posting this because I love those little nuggets of local lore, and partly so I can share this local fact that I just discovered.
My city's cathedral has this amazing double-bowl copper font (different angle here) which I had assumed was ancient - the cathedral is almost 1000 years old - but it turns out that until 1994 these bowls were being used at a local chocolate factory to make caramel to go inside Rolos and was gifted to the church when the factory closed.
I've been somewhere similar in Budapest, it is, as you say, kinda neat.
Most of RoboCop was filmed here (
Dallas) because it already looked like a dystopian hellhole saving on the need for expensive sets and special effects.
What is it with all these folks online I seem to know from DFW?
Because you're my stalker?
I live in southern BC, but my area has one of the lowest winter sunshine hour measurements in Canada, lower than the soggy wet coast and many places in the Yukon or NWT. đź«
A combination of mountain ranges and pervasive winter fog.
City: My city is the birthplace of John McCrae, who wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields", a poem that is often read on Remembrance Day in Canada. It is also the place that Yukon Gold potatoes were created.
Region: This area is quite popular with Guillermo Del Toro - he does a lot of film / tv shoots around here. A lot of other film makers love the area as well; southern Ontario has a fairly booming film industry.
Province: The official bird of the province I live in (Ontario) is the Loon, which is really appropriate the closer you get to Toronto. The southernmost point of Ontario - Point Pelee - is south of the northernmost point of California. Actually, there are 27 states that are entirely more northern than the southern tip of Ontario.
Country: The country I live in invented the telephone, the snowblower (makes sense), insulin, Baseball (everyone knows about Basketball, but Baseball too!), Trivial Pursuit, road surface markings (1930 - between ontario and quebec), and Superman. And thousands of other awesome things. And we gave the world Keanu Reeves.
J.R.R. Tolkien taught at the university in Leeds for several years. This has the rather amusing side effect of lots of a certain type of person claiming that they live in or near to his old house when Tolkien was resident here. However there's no blue plaque to say where he actually lived, so it's all just guesswork. There are lots of little bits of parks and green space that are incredibly reminiscent of Hobbiton though! No Middle Earth was written here, but he did leave behind a book called Songs for the Philologists, full of songs and poems that he and his colleagues in the English Language department used to sing together. One particular favourite is essentially a diss song towards the English Literature department, which always tickles me.
For all the Americans on Tildes, we also have a pub which has been continually open since before your nation existed :)
Don't leave me hanging, we need details!!! :P
I didn't think the booklet had been digitized, but I was wrong!
Lit' and Lang'
Once there were two little groups,
Once there were two little groups,
Once there were two little groups,
Called Lit’ and Lang’.
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Lit’ was lazy till she died,
Of homophemes.
'I don't like philology,’ Poor Lit’ said.
Psychotherapeutics failed, And now she’s dead.
Doctors cut up all the corpse,
Doctors cut up all the corpse,
Doctors cut up all the corpse,
But searched in vain;
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’t find it anywhere,
They couldn’t find the brain.
Did Lang’ go into mourning-weeds?
I don’t think!
He quickly wiped a tear away
And had another drink.
Other gems include a reference to a Dumbledore on page 17 (it transpires that Dumbledore is an old dialectic word for bumblebee) and an early version of Sam's troll song from Fellowship of the Ring (p19). For bonus points, here's Tolkien singing the troll song. And the tune he uses is actually an old traditional folk tune, see for example Daddy Fox.
The Tropic of Cancer passes about a kilometer from my house. Here's a signboard.
🤨
I just try to tag my posts properly and I've never quite managed it yet. No offence intended, you're just better at tagging than me!
My eyebrow raise was purely in jest, unlike in real life, where I've never managed to pull one off succesfully without it looking like a bizarre facial contortion. Sad times.
Nonsense! Tagging is a collaborative effort, with no right or wrong answers, simply the friends we made along the way. You keep tagging, I'll keep tweaking, and hopefully the jumble of content sorts itself into cohesion on the shelves.
I know it's off topic of the intention of this thread - and this is also a "you must be fun at parties" sort of comment - but I think tagging is one of those things that needs multiple people to look at. I tend to give some effort into the tags I select, but I won't get all the tags, because I don't think of things the same way that other people do. Tags are additive, free, and easy, so the more tags the better! I don't look forward to the day that nobody has a tag to add, because whenever someone (and yes, it's usually @mycketforvirrad) adds a tag, it means that somebody has done some thinking about what I've shared.
I always think of it more as "oooh, I think this also related to this thing, cool right?" and not "ooh, I can't believe you didn't think of this tag, dummy". Collaboration not consternation.
For me it's not so much that I feel like I'm being put down or corrected, more that I have forgotten the tildes style/conventions when adding tags. So adding "author:foo.bar" to things, that sort of thing.
I can only just manage to remember to post titles in sentence case Rather Than The More Capitalised Title Case, which is purely a style thing - there's no right or wrong. But it's a convention to remember and it's the same with tags. I always appreciate having relevant tags added; but what mildly annoys me (because it's my failure, not because of anything mods are doing) is when I misremember convention.
Finally, my chance to shine! And impose my own rules for tag hierarchy! Mua-ha-ha-haa!
.local .local .local .local .local .local
I bet @mycketforvirrad has steam coming out of their ears right now :P
Harumph! But on a serious note, can enough of you label my emoji comment 'offtopic'. I feel a bit bad derailing @mat 's fun topic with all this silly meta...
I assume it already is, since it's got 5 votes but is sorted below a comment with only 3.
Phew!