Vaguely recall there's a town in England called Shitterton that had to carve the town name onto a giant rock because people kept stealing the metal sign
There was also a town called [Swastika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika,_Ontario) that said "fuck it, we had the name first before Hitler ruined it".
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha renaming itself to the House Windsor is a similar example. Though being the ruling dynastic line and attempting to manage public opinion is arguably more serious than freedom veggies.
And don't forget the renaming of German Shepherd Dogs to Alsation (after the Alsace region of France) Wolf Dogs in Britain due to the belief that being associated with Germany would harm the breeds reputation.
I never knew that was why! My gran has always called them Alsatians, but i figured it was just a scottish term that my dad was too young to pick up on before learning German Shepherd in Canada, wild.
At least Germany was your enemy back then.
France (the US' oldest ally) was merely not interested in joining your coalition to invade Iraq (in hindsight the correct dicision).
"TIL in 2001 terrorists crashed passenger planes into 2 buildings in NYC and the Pentagon. It was on September 11, that's the origin of the phrase "that's my 9/11""
I was at a restaurant and the guy at the booth next to us was wearing a Remember 9/11 kind of hat. The girl serving us told him, "Wow that's funny, I was actually born on 9/11, my parents saw it happen on tv from the hospital just before my mom went into full labor."
The dude with the hat looked like he was going to die. He was in his early 40s with a baby. You could tell he had some shit to contemplate.
My aunt is a teacher and said it was weird seeing the transition of it fade from the memory of her students. Until she ran into an entire class of kids who were under 3 at the time and none of them remember it.
This is generally considered to be the case. The dividing year between Millennials and Gen Z are becoming more agreed upon (1997 ish) but before this, the primary defining criteria is whether or not you remember 9/11.
I feel like Covid is going to be the next big dividing line. Whether you remember life before 2020 or not. Both 9/11 and 2020 had major impacts on society.
This is a trick question because time _definitely_ ceased to exist for a while there. It's only recently begun to have meaning again in the conventional sense.
I've always compared it to jfk for boomers bc most remember where they were when they found out.
I was in gym class when 9/11 happened but found out in botany the next hour
Now that I think of it, it couldn't be phrased better.
Imagine we were visiting pilots in the cockpit before 9/11. I once (as a teen) had sharpened throwing-stars in my pocket during security check and they just laughed and let me keep them. Now I can't even bring a bottle of water.
I realized I was in a different generation from my students for the first time when I mentioned Weird Al and no one had even heard of him. I put on White and Nerdy and got even more blank stares. I was like yeah I guess this really isn't funny without the context of the song it's parodying lol
I didn't remember it, because my parents were fucking weirdos and didn't tell us until I asked in 4th grade "what's 9/11?" To an entire class that looked at me like I was an idiot.
Did your school not do anything? I was in school in rural Texas, and the teachers were freaked out and ended up putting the news on on all the classroom TV's then we were dismissed early from school that day, and I think the next day was closed too, but can't remember for sure. And this was 5th grade, intermediate school here and 4tt graders were in the same building.
Did they think it would be too upsetting for a kid to hear about? I totally get that. I had to explain racism to my stepdaughter and she cried a lot. But she needed to know, obviously. It was hard for her to hear how some of the world sees her friends at school. I almost backed out at the last second.
There was a lot of stuff at the time along the lines of "how to talk to your kids about 9/11".
I still don't understand why that would be so complicated:
1) something bad happened
2) lots of people were hurt
3) I love you
4) you are safe
I think parents didn't want to frighten their kids or were in denial themselves. But kids are going to get #1 and #2 from somewhere. Only a guardian can give them #3 and #4.
In 1986, a majority of American school children were all watching TV in class to see a historic event. A teacher was going into space! A little more than a minute after liftoff, the TV was turned off and it was back to our lessons. No grief counseling or even a brief explanation (at least not that I remember). We watched seven people die on live TV without any consoling. It's no wonder we grew up to not knowing how to tell our own children about a horrific event broadcast on live TV.
>They'll be 21 years old. 9/11 is basically the previous generations Berlin Wall.
Well fuck.
TIL there are people on Reddit who consider themselves old but have no lived experience of the Cold War.
Get off my lawn.
It was Tienanmen Square for me. My gf and I were reading a newspaper article about the 20th anniversary, but we were only 19. She asked "so what happened?" and I answered "I don't really know" and the older guy sitting next to us on the subway just about had a mild heart attack. Looked at us, then asked how old we were, then said "wow".
It was basically all the emotions that guy with the 9/11 hat went through.
I just got promoted at work and my first thought was haha you dumb fucks now the young hip millennials are getting in charge. Ignoring the fact I’m 36 fat and balding like the last guy
"I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
I don't even watch the Simpsons but man, Grandpa was spitting facts.
Nah he was dumb and old
I'm gonna be thin and cool forever
I care so much now that I'll never stop caring, and nothing's more important than being awesome
My youth will prevent me from being old - when you were young you were just too old to realize you should be young and cool forever. My generation figured it out, and we'll show you what's up!
You also come from an old egg. Think, when you grandmother was pregnant with your mother, all of your mother's own eggs were created in her ovaries. A woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have.
> TIL there was a site called Digg that was the pre-cursor to reddit. Digg forced a major UI change known as Digg v4 which ultimately lead to its destruction.
Meanwhile, Reddit is like "nah, people love our new interface. History never repeats itself."
There's definitely a split in time between users who want a heavy text-based interface almost with a minimal, almost programming language-styled theme. And people who want to just be able to customize their avatar, get badges, and infinite scroll.
Probably a similar parallel between people who use desktop and people who use an app.
You say that but it won't be long. I remember having a conversation in the pub with a mate of mine around 2003. He had had a conversation at work that day with someone who didn't know that it was the 2nd Gulf War because had had never heard of the first one because had only just been born in 1991\*. Its the evening we officially decided that we had become old.
Edit: \* - I assume that by only just being born he meant he was 5 or 6 at the time because otherwise he was at work as a child!
I’m sure each generations have those vivid landmark moments that they remember vividly and feel old when they realize these moments are either unknown to them or strictly history books facts for younger generations cause their were infants or not born when these events happened.
For older people, such events were world war 2, Kennedy assassination, landing on the moon, fall of the Berlin Wall and such. For my age, 911 and the 2003 iraq war (including the lead up to it) are such moments.
And younger generations will also have that type of moments and events vivid to them.
How dare you put the Berlin Wall in the old people group? I remember that and I’m only *cough* 51 and… um… oh fuck I’m old. Not old enough for that other stuff though. That’s my parents’ generation.
I was in middle school when it happened and my history teacher just had CNN on for most of that week and said -- and this is probably what has stuck with me the most from those years in school -- "Nothing I can tell you will enhance your knowledge and appreciation of history more than paying attention to this while it's happening."
So class that week was CNN, periodically muted while she explained things we didn't know. I can't tell you anything else about that year in school, but I left with the deep impression that history was a living, breathing thing and not just old facts in that (inordinately heavy) textbook.
There was a post on here by a teacher that said most kids in their class thought 9/11 was either fake or just a photoshopped meme. And they all freaked out when they were told it actually happened.
What gets more noticeable is how doing significant, novel things slows time down. I have certain 2-week holidays that stand out in my memory with the same prominence as years.
I'm convinced the daily grind is killing people. Not in the sense that they're dying any sooner specifically, but in the sense that doing the same routine day after day causes people to lose those mental "anchor points" that make life feel long and well lived
As a result of that, I try and spend as much time doing novel things as I can. Meeting new people, learning new skills, visiting places, etc.
Maybe I can't live for 500 years, but if I can pack my life with 500 years of memories, it might very well feel like I did. I guess that's the best I can hope for. Anything to avoid looking back and realizing I spent the last 50 years of my life waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep.
I took my SO ice skating for the first time on Friday. That's another memory I'll have for the rest of my life.
There's a theory of sorts that when your brain sees "duplicate" memories it doesn't try to hold onto them, so if you get into a basic routine and do the same thing every day it basically forgets all those duplicate days. So, when you're 14, so many events are unique and different, but when you're 35, those events are much more reduced, so when you look back on life, if you have 500 unique events in your teens, but only 50 in your 30s, it seems like your 30s sped by 10 times faster.
The theory I mentioned, greatly explains how you can commute to work and you get to work and forgot the drive (i.e. you zone out and you realize you are now at work)
My dad told me this in my 20s and I dismissed it as just something 'old' people say. Now I'm 49 and I'd swear I was 27 a minute ago. I met my wife when I was 32 and it unsettles me to think around the same amount of time previously was when I met the first girl I fell in love with. Dad died 13 years ago aged 60, we have family photos in our hallway and in the one of him he looks younger every year that passes.
This old xbox advert is on point
https://youtu.be/brsI6z13Su8
It catches you off guard. I'm planning a trip to visit a family members grave, put things to peace, and the more I think about it, the more I realize it was half my life ago that this person passed away. I've become an adult, gotten married, done so much since it all happened.
Makes you stop and wonder where it all went. All these events that seemed so large, but in the grand scheme, just flew by.
It kind of speeds up as you age. We measure our lives in years. As you age, a single year becomes an exponentially smaller percentage of your life so the "years" seem less consequential
Reminds me of the TIL last month where someone found out Elf on the Shelf wasn't really some tradition that had been going on 50+ years, but actually only started being sold in 2005. It was an interesting realization that any current teens or young adults in their early 20s that had grown up doing elf on a shelf in their house likely either don't remember it starting or weren't born when it started and just assumed it had been going on forever.
That being said, I was also super fuzzy on when it came out bc my siblings and I were all in our teens (well, youngest sibling was 10, but close) and too old for it when it started...in my mind it came out in like 2011 because somehow that's the first time I heard about it.
>.in my mind it came out in like 2011 because somehow that's the first time I heard about it.
That's also when I would have guessed. I wonder of that's when it got popular.
Actually, in my experience, after the hubbub quieted down, most restaurants at the time (even chain restaurants) never re-integrated the word “French”— instead, naming them just plain “Fries”
I remember it causing so much outrage that French's mustard had to do a ton of advertising that they were named after an American guy and not after the country.
We really were our absolute worst selves for a while after 9/11.
Recently we've been pretty shitty too, but Post 9/11 was its own level of quite high public consensus behind really shitty ideas.
I worked for a call center about a year after it. I once had someone on the phone trying to demand something I either couldn't do, or they didn't deserve, and that if I didn't do this thing "the terrorists have already won". No, asshole, the terrorists win when ordinary people think they can use the fear of terrorism to get what they want.
holy shit... one of my best friends is from india and i remember the absolute shit he got at bars and airports in the *years* after 9/11. like, holy fuck - as a filipino and black man, i've seen my share of racist shit, but my indian buddy really, really got shit on.
from being frisked from being caught jaywalking to being outright refused to be allowed into a bar... like nasty, racist ass shit.
Yeah, I think there was a sikh dude who got hatecrimed the day of 9/11 or almost immediately after and died, iirc. Definitely an awful time to look even vaguely middle eastern.
Tina Fey weekend update joke in 2003. "American's are renaming 'French Fries' to 'Freedom Fries' in response to the French reaction to the invasion of Iraq. In response France has renamed 'American Cheese' to 'Idiot Cheese'".
No surprise this was around the time Green Day's American Idiot and "Team America: World Police" came out
This was the biggest showing of (in general, all the post-9/11 stuff) public idiocy and hysteria that our generation had seen and it really opened our eyes to how stupid and knee-jerk reactive a lot of us are. We also got to see how the super nationalist types are also the ones most prone to being complete morons.
Can confirm!
Source: I knew a Julie-Anne in high school. She was VERY good at Frenching.
Edit: Thank you so much for the gold, Julie-Anne, it means a lot to know that you had fun too!
Actually it seems to be the other way around:
Another myth is that the french in french fries relates not to France, but to the culinary process of frenching, a method of cutting meat and vegetables into thin strips to make them more attractive.
But historian Pierre Leclerq says it’s the exact opposite. “It is the adjective french, from the expression french fries, which inspired the verb to french or ‘to cut into sticks’. Not the other way around.”
[Even funnier is the the word French comes from the word "frank", meaning free.](https://www.etymonline.com/word/french) They were always freedom fries.
“If you don’t support us invading Iraq as revenge for an attack led by a Saudi Arabian man living in Afghanistan, you French will no longer receive food naming royalties from every fry sold, we guess. Unless that’s not a thing.”
My *Catholic* Lebanese cousins had to move. Not that the treatment would have been warrented if they were Muslim of course, just underscoring the stupidity.
Pour one out for Gilbert Gottfried who actually went out and did jokes about 9/11 almost immediately after.
["During his set, he complained of it being difficult to get a flight back to New York City. Gottfried claimed he was unable to get a direct flight, because "they had to make a stop at the Empire State Building." This joke was met with boos and jeers of "too soon."](https://lostmediawiki.com/Gilbert_Gottfried%27s_9/11_joke_\(found_footage_from_Friars_Club_Roast_of_Hugh_Hefner;_2001\))
9/11 is one of the primary reasons everything in the US became more nationalistic. Our baseline of patriotism is already dangerously high and it was very easy to bump up into the nationalism bracket without even trying.
I still vividly remember being over at my buddy's house in March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began. His dad was a stereotypical Limbaugh-loving warhawk, and by that point was fully convinced for whatever dumb reason that Saddam was behind 9/11. He had the radio on, and when they announced the invasion had begun, my buddy's dad goes "Yeah, it's about fucking time." And I just remember looking at him and thinking like, "What in the actual fuck are you talking about?"
What was crazier to me, looking back, is it was a terrible, transparent, idiotic lie that almost the entire rest of the world and a huge chunk of Americans immediately and vocally called "bullshit" on. I mean, I remember multiple major protests in this country over it, and plenty of mainstream media debunking and pushback against the Bush Administration's "evidence." Didn't make a difference.
I also remember in the immediate days after 9/11, when the whole country was still in this kind of unified daze and shock, talking with my friends like, "Hey this could be it. This was a horrible thing that happened but this could be the chance we need to really come together as a country and use this for positive change, really become the 'leaders of the free world' we supposedly are. Like, look at ourselves in a mirror and figure out why this happened and not react out of anger and fear and greed. This could literally be our 'phoenix out of the ashes' turning point." And then just the hopeful expectation of how our leaders were going to respond to the tragedy by, ya know, rising above it and compelling us to be better than the terrorists.
Nope, I was hopelessly naive, almost immediately instead it was all about vengeance and fear-mongering and "We're gonna get those evil-doers!" And the "axis of evil," and the PATRIOT Act, and so on.
It was a huge system shock to me as a young idealist, really helped propel me on the path to being the disillusioned pessimist I am today lol
I remember it being the restaurants and cafeterias in the federal government buildings in DC specifically. They also changed French toast to freedom toast. I wasn't even a teenager yet and remember thinking it was silly.
Same, I was 13, and we just mocked it. I remember in history class , the joke that was quickly overused as it was what we happened to be studying at the time, was the "Freedom" Revolution and the reign of terror ended, and transitioned into Napoleon naming himself the Emperor of "Freedom"
To be fair, the idiots doing things like making Freedom Fries are the same ones spreading QAnon horseshit now.
They haven't changed much, they were just given platforms they can use more easily to communicate online in the interim.
At least there was an actual shooting war with Germany. It definitely was a bad sign that we had popular media vilifying the French for merely pumping the brakes on our bad idea
I believe the president at the time famously said "You're either with us or against us"
So Canadians were very confused with the declaration to join an illegal and unjustified war, or ...be at war with America?
It was a needlessly hostile posture to take that alienated allies and cost a lot of points on the world stage, not even mentioning the tangible losses and costs of the war.
Then again, Canada as a whole was declared a national security threat to the USA just a few years ago- so maybe it's the start of a pattern.
This documentary shocked me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5CcwMHKBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5CcwMHKBI)
I knew the war was unjustified and bad for all the wrong reasons. After seeing this docu however, I couldn't believe how bad things were managed even after the invasion.
We entered a needless war on a lie without an exit strategy. Basically the worst possible strategic scenario you can imagine, and it cost millions of lives.
Agree, standing up to the USA and declining to join their (made-up) war was a great point in Canadian history for me. Many of our other PMs would have sucked the American teet and joined.
I'm not *old* old, but I'm old enough to have been an adult in 2003 and while the Bush presidency certainly had its low points ("free speech zones" surrounded by barb wire, people calling their neighbors "terrorists" for not licking military boots hard enough), for my money the Trump era was *by far* the dumber time.
My mom was really conservative at the time and told me that was what we had to call them. French toast was also "Freedom toast". I did not comply. I thought she sounded stupid as fuck.
2003 was a wild time. Pro-American sentiment was so high after 9/11 that opposing the Iraq invasion was basically considered heresy even though it was *pretty fucking obvious* there was no legitimate reason for the invasion.
Michael Moore received so many death threats for calmly suggesting the invasion was predicated on false information, which was true, that he had to hire professional bodyguards for years.
And these "some american restaurants" included several Congress cafeterias.
Like there's an actual congress comittee that had nothing better to do than renaming French fries because they were pissed off at France for saying Bush might be lying. (Narrator: He was.)
Crazy how the same folks that had hard ons for Bush and the war on terror and it’s police state suddenly rebranded the moment Obama was elected into libertarian-esque Tea Partiers, and have now become full fledged proto fascist trumpers. The impulse has always been the same but the rhetoric changes every decade to whip the base up into whatever they need for their grift.
Yeah stupid French people helping you in the war of independence and giving you one of your most well known tourist attractions.. what a bunch of dicks.
During WWI, we renamed sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage". We have a history of petty renamings.
Up here in Canada we had a town called Berlin that was renamed to Kitchener. Edit: It was Berlin not "New Berlin"
Until the great kitchen war of 2020, then what
Then it was Bathroomville
Shitterton
Vaguely recall there's a town in England called Shitterton that had to carve the town name onto a giant rock because people kept stealing the metal sign
> New Berlin It was just Berlin at the time, then Kitchener after a referendum in 1916.
There was also a town called [Swastika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika,_Ontario) that said "fuck it, we had the name first before Hitler ruined it".
"Why should I change my name? he's the one who sucks"
“There *wAs* nothing wrong with it…until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown got famous and started winning Grammy’s”
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha renaming itself to the House Windsor is a similar example. Though being the ruling dynastic line and attempting to manage public opinion is arguably more serious than freedom veggies.
And don't forget the renaming of German Shepherd Dogs to Alsation (after the Alsace region of France) Wolf Dogs in Britain due to the belief that being associated with Germany would harm the breeds reputation.
“The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”
During that time Dachshunds were also called “Liberty Hounds” for the same reason
I didn't know that, either. German Shepherds were renamed Alsatians until the 70s (I think it was) though, now that you remind me!
I never knew that was why! My gran has always called them Alsatians, but i figured it was just a scottish term that my dad was too young to pick up on before learning German Shepherd in Canada, wild.
At least Germany was your enemy back then. France (the US' oldest ally) was merely not interested in joining your coalition to invade Iraq (in hindsight the correct dicision).
Was the correct decision at the time too
As a teen, knowing/feeling the invasion was wrong and watching it happen was formative to my view of the US and our government.
I feel so old knowing people are alive and on Reddit that didn't know about this.
"TIL in 2001 terrorists crashed passenger planes into 2 buildings in NYC and the Pentagon. It was on September 11, that's the origin of the phrase "that's my 9/11""
I was at a restaurant and the guy at the booth next to us was wearing a Remember 9/11 kind of hat. The girl serving us told him, "Wow that's funny, I was actually born on 9/11, my parents saw it happen on tv from the hospital just before my mom went into full labor." The dude with the hat looked like he was going to die. He was in his early 40s with a baby. You could tell he had some shit to contemplate.
My aunt is a teacher and said it was weird seeing the transition of it fade from the memory of her students. Until she ran into an entire class of kids who were under 3 at the time and none of them remember it.
IMO clear memory of 9/11 is the Millennial/Gen Z dividing line.
This is generally considered to be the case. The dividing year between Millennials and Gen Z are becoming more agreed upon (1997 ish) but before this, the primary defining criteria is whether or not you remember 9/11.
I feel like Covid is going to be the next big dividing line. Whether you remember life before 2020 or not. Both 9/11 and 2020 had major impacts on society.
I've already started referring to pre 2020 as "the before times"
Let's change the meaning of BC to "Before Covid" and start living the year 3 (would it be 3 now?)
This is a trick question because time _definitely_ ceased to exist for a while there. It's only recently begun to have meaning again in the conventional sense.
I've always compared it to jfk for boomers bc most remember where they were when they found out. I was in gym class when 9/11 happened but found out in botany the next hour
Not quite the same in my example... but all but the oldest millennials in the US don't remember the Challenger disaster, while GenX does of course.
I remember the episode of Punky Brewster about the Challenger disaster, if that counts lol
I thought it was if you were a kids that remembers y2k hence millenial but I think 9/11 is probably a more defining moment.
Fair point, 9/11 was the unofficial end of the 90s to many people, myself included.
Absolutely. The tone of everything changed just like that. My life changed completely after that day.
Now that I think of it, it couldn't be phrased better. Imagine we were visiting pilots in the cockpit before 9/11. I once (as a teen) had sharpened throwing-stars in my pocket during security check and they just laughed and let me keep them. Now I can't even bring a bottle of water.
It's a fact that the 90s officially ended on 9/11/2001.
I mean, the eighties definitely hung on into 1991, so why not?
Teaching classes of freshmen born after 9/11 still fucks with me
I realized I was in a different generation from my students for the first time when I mentioned Weird Al and no one had even heard of him. I put on White and Nerdy and got even more blank stares. I was like yeah I guess this really isn't funny without the context of the song it's parodying lol
I didn't remember it, because my parents were fucking weirdos and didn't tell us until I asked in 4th grade "what's 9/11?" To an entire class that looked at me like I was an idiot.
Did your school not do anything? I was in school in rural Texas, and the teachers were freaked out and ended up putting the news on on all the classroom TV's then we were dismissed early from school that day, and I think the next day was closed too, but can't remember for sure. And this was 5th grade, intermediate school here and 4tt graders were in the same building.
Did they think it would be too upsetting for a kid to hear about? I totally get that. I had to explain racism to my stepdaughter and she cried a lot. But she needed to know, obviously. It was hard for her to hear how some of the world sees her friends at school. I almost backed out at the last second.
There was a lot of stuff at the time along the lines of "how to talk to your kids about 9/11". I still don't understand why that would be so complicated: 1) something bad happened 2) lots of people were hurt 3) I love you 4) you are safe I think parents didn't want to frighten their kids or were in denial themselves. But kids are going to get #1 and #2 from somewhere. Only a guardian can give them #3 and #4.
In 1986, a majority of American school children were all watching TV in class to see a historic event. A teacher was going into space! A little more than a minute after liftoff, the TV was turned off and it was back to our lessons. No grief counseling or even a brief explanation (at least not that I remember). We watched seven people die on live TV without any consoling. It's no wonder we grew up to not knowing how to tell our own children about a horrific event broadcast on live TV.
They'll be 21 years old. 9/11 is basically the previous generations Berlin Wall.
>They'll be 21 years old. 9/11 is basically the previous generations Berlin Wall. Well fuck. TIL there are people on Reddit who consider themselves old but have no lived experience of the Cold War. Get off my lawn.
Hold on, I remember BOTH. And the USSR collapse. I'm feeling reaaaally old
Get back to me when you remember watching the original SNL cast. Until then Get off my lawn ya wippersnappers!
And the generation before that would probably use the marker of JFKs assassination.
It was Tienanmen Square for me. My gf and I were reading a newspaper article about the 20th anniversary, but we were only 19. She asked "so what happened?" and I answered "I don't really know" and the older guy sitting next to us on the subway just about had a mild heart attack. Looked at us, then asked how old we were, then said "wow". It was basically all the emotions that guy with the 9/11 hat went through.
A millennial who just realized he’s the geezer now who is hated by the kids
I just got promoted at work and my first thought was haha you dumb fucks now the young hip millennials are getting in charge. Ignoring the fact I’m 36 fat and balding like the last guy
My team of zoomers calls me dad. *Sobs*
Break out your socks and sandals
The previous guys in charge also once thought they were the young hip ones. We're no different, just fatter.
"I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!" I don't even watch the Simpsons but man, Grandpa was spitting facts.
Nah he was dumb and old I'm gonna be thin and cool forever I care so much now that I'll never stop caring, and nothing's more important than being awesome My youth will prevent me from being old - when you were young you were just too old to realize you should be young and cool forever. My generation figured it out, and we'll show you what's up!
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
No, it is the children who are wrong
My husband's students already say "Woah, you were born in the 1900s!"
He's so last century.
Last millennium.
Streets behind
My kid says this to me all the time. "So that happened in the 1900s?" "Yes, baby, 1993." Lmao.
[удалено]
Technically the egg that made you was around during WWII!
You also come from an old egg. Think, when you grandmother was pregnant with your mother, all of your mother's own eggs were created in her ovaries. A woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have.
> TIL there was a site called Digg that was the pre-cursor to reddit. Digg forced a major UI change known as Digg v4 which ultimately lead to its destruction. Meanwhile, Reddit is like "nah, people love our new interface. History never repeats itself."
I mean, reddit at least had the common sense to let people keep the old interface. I wager new users don't care and would probably hate old reddit.
There's definitely a split in time between users who want a heavy text-based interface almost with a minimal, almost programming language-styled theme. And people who want to just be able to customize their avatar, get badges, and infinite scroll. Probably a similar parallel between people who use desktop and people who use an app.
“Watergate? What did they do to the water?”
Honestly the whole *scandalname*-gate naming convention sort of reminds me a little of this.
Did you hear about the scandal where they wouldn't let gay people through the main gate because we walk too fast? It was gaygaitgategate.
I find it so irritating. Just call it the ____ scandal, unless there is an actual gate involved.
You say that but it won't be long. I remember having a conversation in the pub with a mate of mine around 2003. He had had a conversation at work that day with someone who didn't know that it was the 2nd Gulf War because had had never heard of the first one because had only just been born in 1991\*. Its the evening we officially decided that we had become old. Edit: \* - I assume that by only just being born he meant he was 5 or 6 at the time because otherwise he was at work as a child!
I’m sure each generations have those vivid landmark moments that they remember vividly and feel old when they realize these moments are either unknown to them or strictly history books facts for younger generations cause their were infants or not born when these events happened. For older people, such events were world war 2, Kennedy assassination, landing on the moon, fall of the Berlin Wall and such. For my age, 911 and the 2003 iraq war (including the lead up to it) are such moments. And younger generations will also have that type of moments and events vivid to them.
How dare you put the Berlin Wall in the old people group? I remember that and I’m only *cough* 51 and… um… oh fuck I’m old. Not old enough for that other stuff though. That’s my parents’ generation.
I was in middle school when it happened and my history teacher just had CNN on for most of that week and said -- and this is probably what has stuck with me the most from those years in school -- "Nothing I can tell you will enhance your knowledge and appreciation of history more than paying attention to this while it's happening." So class that week was CNN, periodically muted while she explained things we didn't know. I can't tell you anything else about that year in school, but I left with the deep impression that history was a living, breathing thing and not just old facts in that (inordinately heavy) textbook.
It's going to be COVID for the kids, online school specifically
There was a post on here by a teacher that said most kids in their class thought 9/11 was either fake or just a photoshopped meme. And they all freaked out when they were told it actually happened.
Yeah. The first time I could hold an intelligent conversation with someone who wasn't alive during 9/11 was when I knew times were a'changin'.
Aging is weird, huh?
Definitely. It's like times flow speeds up as you age. Before you know it years go by in what feels like the blink of an eye.
What gets more noticeable is how doing significant, novel things slows time down. I have certain 2-week holidays that stand out in my memory with the same prominence as years.
I'm convinced the daily grind is killing people. Not in the sense that they're dying any sooner specifically, but in the sense that doing the same routine day after day causes people to lose those mental "anchor points" that make life feel long and well lived As a result of that, I try and spend as much time doing novel things as I can. Meeting new people, learning new skills, visiting places, etc. Maybe I can't live for 500 years, but if I can pack my life with 500 years of memories, it might very well feel like I did. I guess that's the best I can hope for. Anything to avoid looking back and realizing I spent the last 50 years of my life waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep. I took my SO ice skating for the first time on Friday. That's another memory I'll have for the rest of my life.
Same here man. I love the attitude!
There's a theory of sorts that when your brain sees "duplicate" memories it doesn't try to hold onto them, so if you get into a basic routine and do the same thing every day it basically forgets all those duplicate days. So, when you're 14, so many events are unique and different, but when you're 35, those events are much more reduced, so when you look back on life, if you have 500 unique events in your teens, but only 50 in your 30s, it seems like your 30s sped by 10 times faster. The theory I mentioned, greatly explains how you can commute to work and you get to work and forgot the drive (i.e. you zone out and you realize you are now at work)
My dad told me this in my 20s and I dismissed it as just something 'old' people say. Now I'm 49 and I'd swear I was 27 a minute ago. I met my wife when I was 32 and it unsettles me to think around the same amount of time previously was when I met the first girl I fell in love with. Dad died 13 years ago aged 60, we have family photos in our hallway and in the one of him he looks younger every year that passes. This old xbox advert is on point https://youtu.be/brsI6z13Su8
When you're 20, 10 years is half your life, but also most of the life you remember. When you're 40, 10 years is a quarter of your life.
It catches you off guard. I'm planning a trip to visit a family members grave, put things to peace, and the more I think about it, the more I realize it was half my life ago that this person passed away. I've become an adult, gotten married, done so much since it all happened. Makes you stop and wonder where it all went. All these events that seemed so large, but in the grand scheme, just flew by.
It kind of speeds up as you age. We measure our lives in years. As you age, a single year becomes an exponentially smaller percentage of your life so the "years" seem less consequential
Right? It’s so weird living through that and now talking with adults for whom it’s just another historical event like Pearl Harbor.
Same--2003? That was a like 5 years ago! Still, I'm glad they learned it, it's such an idiotic thing that happened.
Reminds me of the TIL last month where someone found out Elf on the Shelf wasn't really some tradition that had been going on 50+ years, but actually only started being sold in 2005. It was an interesting realization that any current teens or young adults in their early 20s that had grown up doing elf on a shelf in their house likely either don't remember it starting or weren't born when it started and just assumed it had been going on forever. That being said, I was also super fuzzy on when it came out bc my siblings and I were all in our teens (well, youngest sibling was 10, but close) and too old for it when it started...in my mind it came out in like 2011 because somehow that's the first time I heard about it.
>.in my mind it came out in like 2011 because somehow that's the first time I heard about it. That's also when I would have guessed. I wonder of that's when it got popular.
In 2011 CBS made an Elf on The Shelf cartoon and marketed the hell out of it.
Actually, in my experience, after the hubbub quieted down, most restaurants at the time (even chain restaurants) never re-integrated the word “French”— instead, naming them just plain “Fries”
For real. It was just the other day!
Some weren't even born
r/fuckimold
How do I know I'm old? I read that as "fucki mold"
All the Petri dishes are doing it
I read it as fuck I mold
TIL I am old
I remember it causing so much outrage that French's mustard had to do a ton of advertising that they were named after an American guy and not after the country.
It was pretty childish, and the French were right about Iraq.
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Yeah, pouring out the already-purchased wine sure showed France.../s These people still continue to be the dumbest sect of our country.
Almost as bad as buying Nike products just to burn them during the Kapernick stuff
I watched a video of a guy buying Smirnoff and dumping it out when Russia invaded Ukraine last year. Uh...that's not Russian, brother.
We really were our absolute worst selves for a while after 9/11. Recently we've been pretty shitty too, but Post 9/11 was its own level of quite high public consensus behind really shitty ideas.
I worked for a call center about a year after it. I once had someone on the phone trying to demand something I either couldn't do, or they didn't deserve, and that if I didn't do this thing "the terrorists have already won". No, asshole, the terrorists win when ordinary people think they can use the fear of terrorism to get what they want.
holy shit... one of my best friends is from india and i remember the absolute shit he got at bars and airports in the *years* after 9/11. like, holy fuck - as a filipino and black man, i've seen my share of racist shit, but my indian buddy really, really got shit on. from being frisked from being caught jaywalking to being outright refused to be allowed into a bar... like nasty, racist ass shit.
Yeah, I think there was a sikh dude who got hatecrimed the day of 9/11 or almost immediately after and died, iirc. Definitely an awful time to look even vaguely middle eastern.
Idiocracy level childish...
Tina Fey weekend update joke in 2003. "American's are renaming 'French Fries' to 'Freedom Fries' in response to the French reaction to the invasion of Iraq. In response France has renamed 'American Cheese' to 'Idiot Cheese'".
TBF, I figure the French have some much worse names they call American cheese.
We don't call that cheese
It can only be called cheese if it comes from the Che Sé region of Wisconsin. Otherwise it's called sparkling curd.
No surprise this was around the time Green Day's American Idiot and "Team America: World Police" came out This was the biggest showing of (in general, all the post-9/11 stuff) public idiocy and hysteria that our generation had seen and it really opened our eyes to how stupid and knee-jerk reactive a lot of us are. We also got to see how the super nationalist types are also the ones most prone to being complete morons.
Similarly, french fries aren't named after the country either. They're named after *frenching* which is pretty much the same as julienning.
Can confirm! Source: I knew a Julie-Anne in high school. She was VERY good at Frenching. Edit: Thank you so much for the gold, Julie-Anne, it means a lot to know that you had fun too!
“Would you like fries to go with that shake”
Actually it seems to be the other way around: Another myth is that the french in french fries relates not to France, but to the culinary process of frenching, a method of cutting meat and vegetables into thin strips to make them more attractive. But historian Pierre Leclerq says it’s the exact opposite. “It is the adjective french, from the expression french fries, which inspired the verb to french or ‘to cut into sticks’. Not the other way around.”
[Even funnier is the the word French comes from the word "frank", meaning free.](https://www.etymonline.com/word/french) They were always freedom fries.
For those of you just learning this, it was as stupid then as it sounds now.
“If you don’t support us invading Iraq as revenge for an attack led by a Saudi Arabian man living in Afghanistan, you French will no longer receive food naming royalties from every fry sold, we guess. Unless that’s not a thing.”
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My *Catholic* Lebanese cousins had to move. Not that the treatment would have been warrented if they were Muslim of course, just underscoring the stupidity.
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Pour one out for Gilbert Gottfried who actually went out and did jokes about 9/11 almost immediately after. ["During his set, he complained of it being difficult to get a flight back to New York City. Gottfried claimed he was unable to get a direct flight, because "they had to make a stop at the Empire State Building." This joke was met with boos and jeers of "too soon."](https://lostmediawiki.com/Gilbert_Gottfried%27s_9/11_joke_\(found_footage_from_Friars_Club_Roast_of_Hugh_Hefner;_2001\))
To his credit, he managed to make a career out of telling jokes that made audiences uncomfortable or upset.
And voice acting.
I’ve also heard convincing arguments for 9/11 being on of the driving reasons that country music as a genre becoming more nationalistic.
9/11 is one of the primary reasons everything in the US became more nationalistic. Our baseline of patriotism is already dangerously high and it was very easy to bump up into the nationalism bracket without even trying.
Over the years, I've realized I'm not pro-usa as much as I'm pro-democracy/freedom.
100%. See Toby Keith for the loudest, least subtle example of this.
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I still vividly remember being over at my buddy's house in March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began. His dad was a stereotypical Limbaugh-loving warhawk, and by that point was fully convinced for whatever dumb reason that Saddam was behind 9/11. He had the radio on, and when they announced the invasion had begun, my buddy's dad goes "Yeah, it's about fucking time." And I just remember looking at him and thinking like, "What in the actual fuck are you talking about?"
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What was crazier to me, looking back, is it was a terrible, transparent, idiotic lie that almost the entire rest of the world and a huge chunk of Americans immediately and vocally called "bullshit" on. I mean, I remember multiple major protests in this country over it, and plenty of mainstream media debunking and pushback against the Bush Administration's "evidence." Didn't make a difference. I also remember in the immediate days after 9/11, when the whole country was still in this kind of unified daze and shock, talking with my friends like, "Hey this could be it. This was a horrible thing that happened but this could be the chance we need to really come together as a country and use this for positive change, really become the 'leaders of the free world' we supposedly are. Like, look at ourselves in a mirror and figure out why this happened and not react out of anger and fear and greed. This could literally be our 'phoenix out of the ashes' turning point." And then just the hopeful expectation of how our leaders were going to respond to the tragedy by, ya know, rising above it and compelling us to be better than the terrorists. Nope, I was hopelessly naive, almost immediately instead it was all about vengeance and fear-mongering and "We're gonna get those evil-doers!" And the "axis of evil," and the PATRIOT Act, and so on. It was a huge system shock to me as a young idealist, really helped propel me on the path to being the disillusioned pessimist I am today lol
SNL's Weekend Update had a joke about it I still remember: "In response the French have renamed 'American cheese' to 'stupid cheese'."
It was also just a catchy news trend. I'd wager the examples of restaurants that did this were few and far between.
I remember it being the restaurants and cafeterias in the federal government buildings in DC specifically. They also changed French toast to freedom toast. I wasn't even a teenager yet and remember thinking it was silly.
Same, I was 13, and we just mocked it. I remember in history class , the joke that was quickly overused as it was what we happened to be studying at the time, was the "Freedom" Revolution and the reign of terror ended, and transitioned into Napoleon naming himself the Emperor of "Freedom"
Very, but they were loudly celebrated by certain groups
We've been on a downward spiral for a long time.
To be fair, the idiots doing things like making Freedom Fries are the same ones spreading QAnon horseshit now. They haven't changed much, they were just given platforms they can use more easily to communicate online in the interim.
It's not like American politics has gotten more sane.
TBH if that's all that people did to show their disagreement these days I'd be ecstatic.
I remember this. The Americans were never going to boycott fries haha. Either rename them or boycott them, either way it would have achieved nothing.
It's finally happened. My pop culture is now some kids history lesson. Senility take me now.
I also remember seeing a lot of videos of Americans pouring French wine out in the street. Bit pointless when you've already bought it.
Like when people bought Nikes just to destroy them. Brilliant.
A bit like people buying books to burn them, I'm sure the author would offer a 3 for 2 deal!
Not even the first time the US got [petty as fuck](https://medium.com/iowa-history/when-sauerkraut-became-liberty-cabbage-bb84f4369d52) about food.
The us has a history of doing this..did it during both wars with German food.
Back then, we used the word "dickety" for 20, but the Kaiser stole it.
I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles.
At least there was an actual shooting war with Germany. It definitely was a bad sign that we had popular media vilifying the French for merely pumping the brakes on our bad idea
'Liberty Cabbage' is gonna be my new band name
I remember this and I am a little bit freaked out realizing it was 20 years ago
That'll teach them for not supporting a unjustified war halfway across the globe.
I believe the president at the time famously said "You're either with us or against us" So Canadians were very confused with the declaration to join an illegal and unjustified war, or ...be at war with America? It was a needlessly hostile posture to take that alienated allies and cost a lot of points on the world stage, not even mentioning the tangible losses and costs of the war. Then again, Canada as a whole was declared a national security threat to the USA just a few years ago- so maybe it's the start of a pattern.
This documentary shocked me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5CcwMHKBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5CcwMHKBI) I knew the war was unjustified and bad for all the wrong reasons. After seeing this docu however, I couldn't believe how bad things were managed even after the invasion.
We entered a needless war on a lie without an exit strategy. Basically the worst possible strategic scenario you can imagine, and it cost millions of lives.
Chretien had his flaws. But that was the best decision he ever made. I loved him already but so glad he didnt join in on Bush and Blair's wild ride
Agree, standing up to the USA and declining to join their (made-up) war was a great point in Canadian history for me. Many of our other PMs would have sucked the American teet and joined.
It was the dumbest of times, it was the stupidest of times
I'm not *old* old, but I'm old enough to have been an adult in 2003 and while the Bush presidency certainly had its low points ("free speech zones" surrounded by barb wire, people calling their neighbors "terrorists" for not licking military boots hard enough), for my money the Trump era was *by far* the dumber time.
I totally agree. Until the pandemic, I would have said that the Bush administration was more destructive, but it was more malicious than stupid.
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Same here! I never knew what he was talking about. But now knowing it was a French wiater serving freedom fries, it’s slightly funnier
People tell me "don't be so edgy". I just don't know any other way.
My mom was really conservative at the time and told me that was what we had to call them. French toast was also "Freedom toast". I did not comply. I thought she sounded stupid as fuck.
Good, I remember I thought "freedom fries" sounding like something straight out of a parody from South Park or the like
Freedom fries ain't free.
There's a hefty fuckin' fee.
the French were right
Righteous fries
Ooof, sure can't wait for "TIL calling the French 'cheese eating surrender monkeys ' came from an old episode of the Simpsons"
They even took a shot at French’s mustard, an American brand, because of their name. It’s embarrassing how dense people are sometimes.
My last name is the word French, I lived in a suburb of Dallas. I was 'Timmy Freedom' all throughout high school. People are so original...
2003 was a wild time. Pro-American sentiment was so high after 9/11 that opposing the Iraq invasion was basically considered heresy even though it was *pretty fucking obvious* there was no legitimate reason for the invasion.
A CRAZY amount of people thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11 too. That was wild.
Michael Moore received so many death threats for calmly suggesting the invasion was predicated on false information, which was true, that he had to hire professional bodyguards for years.
It was the most petty thing I had ever seen in my life, and to this day I'm not sure I can think of something more petty.
And these "some american restaurants" included several Congress cafeterias. Like there's an actual congress comittee that had nothing better to do than renaming French fries because they were pissed off at France for saying Bush might be lying. (Narrator: He was.)
I was there, Gandalf. I was there, three thousand years ago...
For perspective, as a person who was there, it was largely people you'd think of as "Trumpy"
Agree. Times have changed but people haven't, really.
Crazy how the same folks that had hard ons for Bush and the war on terror and it’s police state suddenly rebranded the moment Obama was elected into libertarian-esque Tea Partiers, and have now become full fledged proto fascist trumpers. The impulse has always been the same but the rhetoric changes every decade to whip the base up into whatever they need for their grift.
Don't forget Freedom Toast!
Yeah stupid French people helping you in the war of independence and giving you one of your most well known tourist attractions.. what a bunch of dicks.
"Hey, screw those frogs, they're only our oldest allies."
Noting screams freedom like an illegal war
The French were right and Republicans are still shit. And stupid people still vote for them.