TodayILearned
Room 101 was a meeting room
#TodayILearned, via mastodonapp.uk/@Probertd… that
“The original Room 101 was not in Broadcasting House as the BBC maintains but in 55 Portland Place.
It was where the Eastern Service held Committee meetings some of which Orwell attended, until the Indian Services office moved to 200 Oxford Street.
The point so far as Orwell was concerned was not death by impalement or drowning or the other deathly delights he mentions but attendance at meetings which, though beloved by bureaucrats, to Orwell and anyone else engaged in creative pursuits was a fate worse than death. For evidence and further details see A Life in Letters, p. 197”
Orwell at the BBC: Two Wasted Years? - orwellsociety.com/orwell-at…
#TodayILearned that ‘scarper’ is rhyming slang, derived from Scapa Flow, rhyming with ‘go’….at least according to the attached
Scapa Flow was naval base - it’s probably best known for the scuttling of the German fleet at the end of World War One
“Drummers are like hockey goalies. No-one knows how to talk to them apart from other drummers”
#TodayILearned how much of a drummer Karen Carpenter was
Word In Your Ear Is Karen Carpenter pop music’s saddest story?
#TodayILearned the phrase ‘gish gallop’. It’s means to create a deluge of rubbish in argument, to overwhelm your opponent
Mehdi Hasan | Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
#TodayILearned that Richard Whittington really was apprenticed to someone called Sir Ivo FitzWaryn and married his daughter Alice
(For the benefit of people who aren’t the UK and/or aren’t pantomime nerds, Dick Whittington is one of the three or four main pantomime stories. It’s based on a 14th Century Mayor of London…but I didn’t realize the FitzWarrens also really existed)
#TodayILearned that the TV audience that is most disproportionately Labour voting is Taskmaster, followed by Rupaul’s Drag Race, and Big Brother
Somewhat frustratingly, Mr Osman doesn’t exactly tell us which shows are the most disproportionately Conservative, Liberal, Green or SNP……but the show which is directly in proportion to national voting intention is Question Time
#OnThisDay in 1930, which was Good Friday, the BBC News Announcer announced, in the evening bulletin, that ‘There is no news’ and then played some music instead
#TodayILearned that Chris Spedding, who produced the Cramps, and possibly the Sex Pistols, and had a hit with MotorBikin' was also one of the Wombles
Underground, Overground - Mike Batt on Word in your Ear - youtu.be/5JUqyAp7H…
Chris Spedding - Wikipedia - en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chri…
Remember You’re A Womble by The Wombles - songwhip.com/thewomble…
It’s clearly not the main point of my friend Tom’s podcast, but #TodayILearned that ‘Kosovo’ is derived from ‘Kosovo Polje’ which means ‘the field of blackbirds’….which I quite like
The Hated and the Dead podcast: Kosovo Serbs - podtail.com/en/podcas…
#TodayILearned that the first known use of the word ‘celebrity’ was by Geoffrey Chaucer, translating someone I didn’t catch the name of 🎙️
This isn’t perfect, in that it doesn’t cope with the ‘nd’ in ‘2nd’, bit it’s good enough
A vim mapping to insert the day and date as a header for notes, journals etc
map <Leader>m :put =strftime('%A %dth %B %Y')<cr>:s/ 0/ /<cr>kJi## <Esc>
#TodayILearned that to comment out the currently selected text in VS Code you can do Ctrl + /
#TodayILearned that the first Beatle’s concert in the United States was at Boneyard Bocce Ball Club in Benton, Illinois.
The first Beatles concert in the US was somewhere else
Harry Houdini and the Barrel of Tetley's
#TodayILearned that, when he was in Leeds, Houdini was sponsored by Tetley’s Bitter to perform his ‘escaping from a locked milk churn full of water’ trick with the milk churn instead filled with beer
The trick depended on air being trapped in the domed lid of the churn, and in that instance the air was largely replaced with CO2 and alcohol fumes
The escape failed and Houdini was rescued by his assistant
Timewatch, 2000-2001: The Houdini Myth: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001xqqn via @bbciplayer
Also www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opin…
#TodayILearned that the Galway Girl in Steve Earle’s song, but not in Ed Sheeran’s song, is called Joyce Redmond, and she plays the bodhrán on the Steve Earle one 🎵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Girl_(Steve_Earle_song)
#TodayILearned that:
Initialisms are made from the first letter (or letters) of a string of words, but can’t be pronounced as words themselves (e.g. FBI, CIA). Acronyms are made from the first letter (or letters) of a string of words but are pronounced as if they were words themselves (e.g. NASA, hazmat). What I Learned: The Phoenix Project Audiobook - IT Revolution
Personally, I’m not sure that this is a very useful distinction, but it’s interesting
I guess ‘SQL’ is an initialism to those who pronounce it ‘S.Q.L’ and and acronym for those who say ‘sequel’.
How to set default parameters for other people's Powershell cmdlets
Not exactly #TodayILearned because I vaguely remember learning that you can do this, but had never got around to doing so.
This is how you can set a default parameter in Powershell. As far as I know, it works with any cmdlet. I’m using it here to set the default for Pester to show me all the results of all the tests….because I love seeing that sea of green :)
$PSDefaultParameterValues += @{ 'Invoke-Pester:Output' = 'Detailed' }
#Powershell
#TodayILearned that a ‘wolf tone’ is “an undesirable phenomenon that occurs in some bowed-string instruments…. It happens when the pitch of the played note is close to a particularly strong natural resonant frequency of the body of the musical instrument.”
I’ve listened to them for about 30 years….but I never realised that the name of the band had two meanings
#TodayILearned that the lyric is
“You don’t have to say you love me Just be close at hand”
…not
”You don’t have to say you love me Just because of him"
#TodayILearned that Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie Kray got £255,000 from the 1990 film 📺📽️🎙️
The selling of the Krays: how two mediocre criminals created their own legend – podcast
